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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

I just gave away a very expensive Garmin to my son. Its feature set is to dream of. Its user interface is hot garbage. When I'm out on a hike or in the pool trying to just measure my fsking laps I need a single click option or something. Their paradigm of "button 1, button 3, button 5, long press button 4, button 1 again to confirm. Now you can push off the wall in 3... 2... 1" is beyond fucking stupid.

Does anyone at Garmin actually practice sports? For a company with such great hardware they really need someone competent on the UX team. Throwing everything into more and more menus and submenus is not working.

The specific watch I'm criticizing is Garmin Instinct 2x solar. The name is very ironic because there is nothing intuitive about using that watch. Like, at all.

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On the positive side, I adore that they sell (sold?) the forerunner series with all physical buttons and no touchscreen. Garbage software, but being able to click through by muscle memory instead of dealing with a touch interface in sunny conditions is essential to me. Fitbits and apple watches have just always been too reliant on the touch method for my liking.

The software is pretty crap though, and forerunner in particular is way too locked down towards running activities.

You have trouble with touch interface in sunny conditions??? Try cold conditions with gloves on, then you'll have real problems with the Apple Watch. Or wet conditions. Or fast conditions like on a bike where you rather not look to turn off the alarm. Sunny conditions is the only time my watch works fine.

My gloves work well on my Apple watch.

Wet is always a disaster, though. If it's going to be moist outside (like hiking with a rain jacket), you have to remember to apply water lock immediately, or you're done for. In that case, the watch is pretty much useless until you get back inside, which is in fact very annoying.

The 265 and 975 both have touch screen on top of the buttons.

I don't swim, but I have done thousands of runs with my series of garmin watches and I can say that the UX for them is spectacular, everything is in a sensible place for me to do without thinking.

Not sure what problems you've had with it specifically

Getting into the swim app itself takes a couple of different buttons presses. But then it tries to be both too smart and too stupid at the same time. All I wanted to begin with was lap counting with a big number on the centre of the display. Can't configure it and can't even start to get it to count laps without some ceremony of setting up interval training and it only gets more convoluted from there. It's useless for an amateur like me who is not a peak performance athlete who needs to track every minutiae of their swim stats. How many people are they targeting with these this UX? Just people getting ready for the Olympics? There are hundreds of them. Hundreds!

I don't think you're being serious. I have had several Garmin watches and this is not an actual problem. I do both pool swim and open water activities and it's very easy to count laps. Sometimes I set up structured workouts but that's completely optional.

My vivoactive 5 swimming is top right button short press (activities) scroll tap swim. Top right to start. Screen shows only interval time and distance or laps (configurable). Bottom goes to interval rest. Lots more data and a rest timer. Bottom starts swimming again. Top stops the activity. Long press top to save, bottom to discard.

All operations are buttons because the touch doesn't work well with water on basically every device.

Literally 3 clicks to a large lap counter.

> scroll tap swim

this watch has no touch interface. any scrolling and selecting has to be done via the five buttons which I ALWAYS somehow get wrong. Who on this beautiful earth thought it was sane to make the bottom right button be the "Back" button in a L2R (English) locale?

you replied to a thread talking about garmin watches... not the pebble

I really can't understand what you're complaining about. There's nothing about the English locale which implies an optimal placement for the Back button. The same devices are also sold in other locales.

These devices have to work in all conditions with some complex functionality available through only five buttons so some level of overlap is unavoidable. Do you also complain that your computer keyboard lacks separate buttons for "4" and "$"?

Ideally, in LTR locales, we move from left to right. This means that objects appear from the right side of the screen (as going forward would mean going right), and a back button is more intuitively perceived on the left side.

No, that's not how it works. Especially not on a wrist device.

https://crossvine.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/20250128_0...

But I'd have to try actually swimming with it I guess. It always counts my reps in strength training pretty accurately.

Edit: But then again, if you want to manually track laps, the swimming app doesn't matter. It's only there for the convenience of not having to press a button to increment the counter. You can just copy the "other" activity, name it something like "manual swim" with the lap button enabled. The only thing that differentiates the swim activity from a regular activity is setting the pool length, stroke detection, and automatic lap incrementing. The data is still getting logged the same way as far as I can tell, so using the "other" activity would give you all the data you need to track the swim.

Sounds like you might need to turn off a few defaults to make it easier.

It should just be a case of pressing the start button, navigating to the pool swim activity and pressing start.

Use the lap button to record rest intervals at the wall, everything else is automatic

Garmin is certainly better than some previous smartwatches I've had. You get a sunlight-readable, always-on display and a week-long battery life.

But with my Forerunner, they've packed a lot of options into the five buttons. Leads to a lot of "these buttons are for up and down, except at the start run screen where the up button opens the menu, which you can then navigate with up and down to choose between the six types of run, or exit with the back button"

If you're the type of person who doesn't like to read the manual, you're going to have a bad time.

My Fossil HR Collider lasted 4 weeks. It could do much (but not all) of the stuff my Pebble Classic/Pebble 2 could do. Both could control music during workout, pick up calls, put radios off. What I liked most about it is it could disguise as a non-smartwatch. On top of that, Pebble 2 HRM was bad.

A Pebble successor has to be better than a Pebble 2. The only reason my Pebble 2 isn't used anymore (and why I swapped to Fossil which is discontinued, too) is hardware buttons died. I tried to donor from a Pebble Classic, but sadly failed.

On top of all this, I get skin rashes from watches, so I cannot wear them 24/7.

To be honest, that is not a problem unique to.. well.. any domain-specific company's tech stack.

Raymarine their marine GPS navigation units are supposed to be very intuitive, but they lack so many "that would have been nice" features, and their UX has stuff where various buttons have click / double-click / hold / hold 2s / hold 10s, all to access different functions. Some of it isn't even written down in the manual.

I mean honestly I have this issue with every level of compute device. Smart phones are much more limited than computers and so much stuff is buried. But then think about the absolutes gigantic amount of undocumented buried stuff that exists on Windows and Linux and macOS. You have a keyboard and internets and a mouse and it's still literally millions of people's jobs to deal with UI issues on these devices professionaly.

It's hard to decide if I prefer Android not having a setting I want or Windows having 9 settings panels where that setting might live.

All this plus not being able to see any data while offline. Super useful when you're 13,000 feet up on a mountain somewhere.

Which data are you unable to view while offline? I never sync my Garmin watch to my phone, and I'm able to view all the data that interests me on the watch.

Any data in the app. It just doesn't work offline, at all. Like they looked at a book chapter on basics of data caching and went "nah, not doing that, that's too f#cking advanced".

I'm not sure I understand. I have had an Instinct, Tactix Delta, and Tactix 7 Pro and have always been able to see the data without a phone or any network present.

I love these watches after moving from an Apple watch, primarily for two reasons:

1) the battery life - I cant stand having to charge my watch every day or so - my (current) Tactix 7 will go ~3-4 weeks depending on how much GPS I use.

2) (this may be out of date) when I would use the Strava or Run app on the Apple watch, it would not signal when it had a GPS fix, which resulted in a number of runs that had a "teleport" at the start, resulting in messed up metrics. Only a small thing, but it really frustrated me.

I'm assuming the parent poster is talking about using the Garmin Connect app, which does require connectivity. You are correct, the data is visible directly on the watch.

Its worth clarifying you are talking about the data on the phone app, which does require connectivity as nothing is stored on the phone app, its all on Garmin's servers.

However, most if not all of the data (recorded activities or health data) can be viewed directly on your watch, without any connectivity.

I have a lot of experience working with the Garmin API. The data you can see on the recording device (watch) is limited and basically worthless. Akin to looking at a raw csv full of data rather than nicely plotted over a map.

Why can’t it be also cached on the phone though?

Gadgetbridge added support for Garmin watches recently [1]. All data is stored on your Android phone with no internet connectivity required and you can even export the sqlite DB so you own your sensor data. The UI isn't as nice as Garmin's but it does its job.

[1] https://gadgetbridge.org/basics/topics/garmin/

My Garmin has a dedicated hardware button that says "LAP"

Don't some Garmin watches support long press app launch?

What are you even talking about? Garmin has an auto start/stop feature for lap swimming. All you need to do is single press top right button once to start the session and press the same button to stop and then another button to save it. It will literally do everything else for you automatically.

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