Random gear list is so inconvenient

trux said:

I do have the gear ordered alphabetically

OP is clearly talking about the gear list that is displayed when you select gear for an activity in the Connect iOS app, not the centralized Gear page where you manage gear.

Yes, the page you are talking about is alphabetical.

The list OP is talking about is random. (It changes from activity to activity.)

Also, case-sensitive alphabetical ordering makes little sense for most applications that are aimed at normal users.

"You can use it for pushing favorite gear to the top."

The normal way to do this in modern apps is to allow items to be pinned or reordered, rather than asking users to capitalize the first letter of only the items they want to appear at the top of the list.

1392206 said:

Even alphabetical ordering could be okay.
But total random? 

Agreed. The problem is that list changes from activity to activity, so it's such a pain to edit shoes for multiple activities. You can't use "muscle memory" to quickly select the same shoes for multiple activities.

I have been beating this drum forever.

I've posted about this here, submitted a post to the official Garmin Ideas page, submitted feedback for the Connect app beta last year, Garmin just does not care.

The fact that the gear list is non-alphabetical is just one problem. Other problems (relating to editing gear for an activity):

- if you open the gear tab for an activity and there's no existing gear, a big button is available to add gear. This is great. Unfortunately, if you already have gear for the activity (e.g. if you have default gear assigned to that activity type), then there's no button for adding/removing gear and you have to go somewhere to add or remove gear. (3 dots > add or remove gear)

- There's no *obvious* way to add *new* gear from here (the activity gear tab). The indirect way is to select gear that you didn't really want to select, then tap on that unwanted gear, which takes you to the centralized gear management page

- When you add gear (like shoes) to an activity, existing gear is not deselected. It's another tap to manually deselect your existing gear (shoes), unless you want to have 2 pairs of shoes assigned to the same activity,

While this behaviour might make sense for some random cycling gear, it makes 0 sense for shoes, especially since when you assign multiple pairs of shoes to an activity, there's no way to split up the activity mileage amongst them - each pair of shoes receives the full mileage for the activity. Meaning that even if you really wanted to have multiple pairs of shoes for 1 activity, Garmin doesn't really support that.

All of this means there's a ton of extra taps just to something which should be very simple: select a new pair of shoes for your running activity.

It's like Garmin doesn't use their own apps and/or they hate their own users.

Strava does this very simply and intuitively:

- The drop-down for selecting gear is consistently in reverse chronological order (the newest gear is displayed first)

- If you select a different pair of shoes, the existing pair is de-selected (you can only select one pair of shoes)

- The method for selecting gear is the same whether or not you already have gear selected

- There's a straight forward button in the gear/shoes drop down labelled "Add new gear!"

All of these amounts to fewer tap, less friction, and less annoyance when changing shoes in Strava, compared to Connect. It also helps that the gear selection dropdown is in the same sheet that's displayed when you edit the activity in Strava.

I've talked to plenty of normal Garmin users (at least as normal as it gets, considering they use Garmins like us) who typically give zero Fs about UI/UX or software in general, but they agree that the shoe selection user experience is bad in Connect.

Most runners I know wear a Garmin but use Strava for everything.