The new web home page is a JOKE

It used to be user friendly, and the app was good for checking on day to day things with the web site  making it easy to analyse  data to do with rides etc, however now that is all gone with irrelevant info in the app

Multiple home pages, new widgets? We had all that! 

Martinr2 said:

It used to be user friendly

Are you sure about that? Let's say I want to look at a run, bike ride or hike from a specific date a year or two ago in either the website or the app. This is actually a real use case for me, as sometimes I want to look at a race result from the past, and I happen to know the date because I also have my race results on a different site which also syncs with my Connect account.

What are my choices?

- In the app or site, I can page through the calendar, which takes forever. Every time you click on the button for the previous week/month/year, you have to wait for it load before you can press the button again. There's no way to jump to a specific date instantly or quickly. At least in the stryd app, for example, I can scroll through the calendar view as fast as I can move my finger

- In the app or site, I can scroll through the list of activities, which will take forever in the website. It's just a long "infinite scroll" list with no scrollbar that will at least let me try to jump to a specific point in the timeline, unlike an app like Spotify or many mobile apps or websites which have a custom scrollbar to move through large amounts of data. Sometimes these custom scrollbars also show you a hint about where you are in the list (e.g. a date or first letter of the item name, such as artist name.)

In the app, activities are grouped by week, month or year, but much like the calendar, it's a pain to scroll through the pages bc it's so slow.

- In the site, I open the list of activities, and try to search by date (to show a list of activities between a given start and end date). In order to do so, I have to select an activity type (like running, cycling or other), bc you can't do an advanced search on all activities. I click the advanced search button and enter a date range. The date format is non-standard and non-obvious (there's no placeholder hint on the input fields), so I have to use their awkward calendar controls instead of typing in the start and end dates, unless I know that the format is YYYY/MM/DD (which is different than the international standard of YYYY-MM-DD.) Once I've entered the dates, the input fields are too narrow to see all of what I've entered (the day part of the dates is completely cut off.)

Just because something is user friendly for your purposes, doesn't mean it's great the purposes of others. (Yeah I realize the counter argument can made against me - just bc I dislike something doesn't mean everyone else does.) If you dig into anything at all that Garmin does, you'll find issues. Same with how people ignore the various software issues in Garmin devices as long as they don't experience them or even use the affected features at all.

Oh yeah, and the process of selecting gear (like shoes) is ridiculous in the app.

If you click on the Gear tab of an activity, you can't change (add or remove) gear if gear is already selected (which will likely be the case if you're a runner and you have default shoes). To change gear, you have click on the three dots button, select Add or Remove Gear, then change your gear there. If that wasn't bad enough, selecting a different pair of shoes (gear) doesn't deselect the already selected gear, so that's another tap to deselect the existing gear.

Garmin literally designed a system which allows you to select multiple shoes for a run, which makes zero sense. Even if they wanted that as a feature, multiple selection of shoes should be optional, not the default behavior, bc it just wastes our time whenever we want to change our shoes.

Oh, and every time the list of gear is displayed, it's in a different random order, which means you can't even memorize the list so you can use muscle memory to tap faster.

Contrast with strava, which has far fewer taps to do something as simple as changing gear. It doesn't allow you to select multiple shoes, which means it's one fewer tap than Garmin in that respect. It doesn't hide the gear selection UI in an extra menu item, so that's another saved tap. It also shows the list of gear in the same order every time, which lightens the mental load when you're trying to change gear for multiple activities (i.e. if you have to do the action over and over again, at least it's nice if the details of the action don't randomly change every time.)

Strava also centralize mosts of the activity editing stuff on one page, which further simplifies things and reduces the number of taps. Garmin requires you to tap in a million places to change various properties of your activity. Like if I go to the gym and do a strength workout, it's a million taps to edit the activity name, exercise types, etc.

Not to mention the fact that you can't mix statute/imperial and metric units in the Connect website or app (unlike the device itself), which is a huge F U to people in Canada and other places, and a huge pain if you want to edit strength activity weights after the fact. (Canadians uses metric for distance but statue for for body weight, gym weights, etc, but Garmin forces us to choose one or the other for everything in Connect, so we usually go with metric, if we're runners.)

Make no mistake, I think the new changes to the Connect website suck, but I don't agree with the statement that everything was great before. The dashboard was pretty good, lots of other stuff, not so much.

FlowState said:

lots of other stuff

But did they do anything on the "other stuff"? They just changed the interface for the worse instead of improving things.

I still can't search activities by title or date in the app.

KrapfenKringel said:

But did they do anything on the "other stuff"? They just changed the interface for the worse instead of improving things.

I still can't search activities by title or date in the app.

Agreed. But again, as people pointed out, obviously Garmin wants to save time/money by unifying the home page of the app and the website. Bc the app is obviously the priority, the website's home page had to go.

The new home page is actually ok on mobile (not great, again I have my complaints, but most of my suggestions would probably involve making it more like the old home page haha.) It could be argued that it's somewhat of an improvement.

And yeah, on the website it's a huge step backwards, but we'll see if Garmin listens to us here. I would be happy if they just kept the old dashboard indefinitely.

Ch4rvel said:

You can put your “ideas/ideas” page in your basement or attic. I've written plenty of suggestions over the years to solve certain problems or improve the user experience of their devices. Never received any response in the form of realizing even a small part of it.

Yeah it sucks. It's a one way black hole with no way to share ideas with the community or get feedback from Garmin. That's why it's funny when people imply that we should send ideas to Garmin using that page instead of posting here. I think it would be better to do both, although I also feel that posting to the ideas page is a waste of time.

There are feature request threads in the forums which are 10+ years old. If people didn't post here, we'd have no idea that so many users wanted those features.

Ch4rvel said:

This site is for OUR benefit - not theirs, and until you start thinking like us - and not like them, we have nothing to discuss.

I mean unfortunately this site is here so that we users will help each other for free ("have you tried turning it off and on?" and "did you try syncing with Garmin Express"), in order to cut costs for Garmin tech support.

No different than any other product's user community that's hosted or moderated by the company that sells the product. If there was no benefit to Garmin, then Garmin would not bother to have forums in the first place.

As it happens, I use the mobile app to keep track during the day but use the web page to do my detailed looks.
I'd be surprised if more people ddin't use it the same way but if the majority of users are mobile app only, then we'd better guide our kids to become opticians, as the future's bright for that profession.
Like you, I used the Sync function on the mobile to transfer data across, or Garmin Express when I'm charging or checking for updates.
Like others have suggested, it looks like this is a sneaky move to run down the web page & have all move to app.  
I for one will start looking around for alternative tools, that have the same functionality of GC before Garmin stuffed us.