Yeah I know this is a user-to-user forum, not a bug report forum, and it's unlikely Garmin will read or respond to this post. However, I've reported the same thing in various other channels with no luck, so now it's time to vent.
The gear (running shoes) selection user experience for running activities is just awful.
- If you have gear already selected for an activity, the Gear tab provides no way to change gear (you have to click 3 dots and select Add or Remove Gear).
If you don't have gear selected for an activity, the Gear tab has an Add Gear button, which is pretty nice. Too bad that if you have a default pair of shoes for running (as with most people who track gear in Connect, I assume), then you will never see the Add Gear button. This couldn't be any more annoying and unintuitive - I think it's pretty reasonable to expect the Gear tab in an activity to always allow you to change the gear, but nope.
- The Add or Remove Gear interface allows selection of multiple shoes, not just as an extra mode, but as the default behavior (which can't be turned off).
When shoes are already selected, if the user taps on a different pair of shoes, the original pair of shoes remains selected. It's always an extra tap to deselect the original pair of shoes.
I wonder how many people actually use more than one pair of shoes for a given activity? And if they do, multiple pairs aren't even fully supported in Connect, as each pair would receive the full mileage for the activity, with no way for the user to allocate parts of the activity mileage to different pairs of shoes. So giving the user the ability to select multiple shoes is doubly pointless. Very few ppl would want to do so, and if they did, the feature wouldn't really be useful as implemented.
If Garmin wanted to give people the ability to select multiple shoes, they could have made it so the user would have to enter a special "multiple selection mode", while making the default mode only able to select a single pair of shoes, which would probably serve 99.99% of users. Like seriously, change the UI so there's a "select multiple shoes" button - I bet nobody would ever press it.
- Not only is the list of shoes in the Add or Remove Gear interface not sorted, it appears in a completely different order almost every time you open the list.
This means that if you have more than 2 pairs of shoes, it's extremely annoying to change shoes for multiple activities, as you can't rely on "muscle memory" (*) to pick the right shoes - you have to slow down and actually look at the list. (* What I mean here is that if the list was always in the same order, and you were changing several activities to use the same shoe, you could memorize the position of the shoes in the list - e.g. 2nd pair in the list - and change several activities without even thinking or looking at the list, after the first change.)
Let me be absolutely clear: I'm not unable to use the Gear UI, I just think it sucks.
In contrast, Strava has a simple drop-down list for shoes:
- it sensibly only allows you to select one pair of shoes, which minimizes taps
- it sorts the list of shoes, so that when the user changes shoes for multiple activities in a row, they don't have to deal with a list that changes order every single time
The only advantage Garmin has over Strava in this respect is that Garmin allows you to add shoes to non-running/walking activities, like basketball, and Strava doesn't.