TL;DR the interface for selecting gear is clunky, inconsistent and requires way too many taps to accomplish what should be super simple, especially for runners.
- In the gear tab for an activity, if you don't have any gear selected, then it displays a big Add Gear button. This is great!
- Unfortunately, if you already have gear selected, then the gear tab does not allow you to add or remove gear.
You have to press the 3 dots button and select Add or Remove Gear. This is a baffling decision, quite frankly, and seems pretty inconsistent. Strangely enough, tapping on existing gear in the gear tab does take you to the gear management page. So the activity gear tab does give you a way to do something that people will rarely do (add or retire gear to your profile), but it doesn't let you do something that some people will do literally every day (select existing gear for an activity).
Unfortunately, given that most people who track gear will have default gear (shoes) for running activities, it's unlikely that any activity will start with no gear selected.
- When you select Add or Remove Gear for a running activity, if one pair of shoes is already selected, then selecting a different pair does not deselect the first pair.
You have to tap on the first pair to deselect it. Yet another extra tap. Is there any practical use case where a runner would want to select more than one pair of shoes for a single run? Would that even work properly, in terms of counting mileage? (Who can even say how activity miles should be assigned to multiple shoes?)
- Perhaps most infuriatingly, the order of gear (like shoes) in the Add or Remove Gear interface is apparently completely random. This means it's a huge pain to change shoes for multiple activities, especially if you have more than 2 pairs of unretired shoes.
- In general, it's annoying that in both the Connect website and app, for a given activity there isn't just one screen where you can edit almost everything (unlike, say, Strava). This leads to a lot of extra taps to accomplish stuff which seems like it should be fairly simple (like selecting gear.)
Contrast with selecting gear in Strava:
- Gear selection is part of the activity editing page, which is great! Since I usually want to edit my activity title, this saves me a tap or two because I'm already there
- When I select a new pair of shoes, the existing pair is deselected. It's not possible to select more than one pair of shoes
- The shoes are always listed in the same order
The only thing I like about Garmin's gear system compared to Strava is that Garmin lets you add shoes to non-running activities, like Basketball.
