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Comment by llimllib | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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