Hey Garmin team!
First of all, I love my R50. I use it almost every day. In fact, it will form the backbone of a golf-related YouTube channel I’m launching soon (it’s true, lawyers love to golf). But since I use my R50 every day, a few UX/UI issues drive me batty.
Buttons & Icons > Text
First, the “buttons” for the most used things are extremely small, text based, and not clearly clickable (like “next, “done”, “start playing”, or the left arrow for “back”). Often, in order to advance to another screen, you have to click on a tiny “next” in the upper right hand corner of the screen. It’s like the interface was designed for a website not a kiosk-touchscreen that you have to bend down to use. If we must click “next” to continue, why isn’t the next button a giant green circle on the middle right of the screen? Why isn’t “back” a giant read arrow pointing backwards? I often have to press more than once, because my finger pressed outside of the screen.
Don’t Make Me Scroll
Another example: when you start a practice session, you click a giant colorful picture labeled “practice” — great! This is good! But then you are presented with a “session settings” screen with a bunch on gray non-intuitive boxes and a tiny, orange “start session” text in the upper right corner. It’s not even clear that “start session” is a clickable “button”. Why do I need to scroll to get to all the “session settings?” Why wouldn’t they all be icon tiles and all located in a grid on one screen (which is exactly how you present the different club options before starting the practice session)? There are a lot of areas where the R50 makes me scroll for no apparent reason. This is especially frustrating because there are giant areas of unused “black” space on this screen that could be used for “forward/next” buttons and back buttons.
Unnecessary Screens
Furthermore, now that I think about it, why am I even presented with the “Session settings” screen at all? After setting the initial settings (elevation, temp, etc), I’ve never changed those settings once. Yet, I am forced to click through this screen for every session. This screen is really just unneeded friction. Since we can change all of these settings once we’re “at the range” there is absolutely no reason to make us re-confirm all of these settings again before getting to the club selection screen.
First Order Retrievability For Most Used Features
Speaking of unnecessary scrolling, every time I end a practice session, I need to click on the tiny menu icon in the lower left-hand corner and then scroll to “end session”. It’s guaranteed that at some point in every practice session i’m going to want to end it. Why I’m I forced to go hunting for it the end button? Again, it would be great if the things we use every time were on the screen and not buried in a menu.
Similarly, when I click on “end session” i’m always presented with the option to save the data or delete it. I’ve never once chosen to delete it. Though, frustratingly, I have accidentally clicked “delete” on accident and lost the data. Does anyone regularly delete their data? There’s no reason why we should be forced to affirmatively save every time; if we want to delete the data we can always go back into the menus and do that later. It’s frustrating that when you’re done with a session there’s a ton of friction: first you have to open a menu, scroll, click “end”, click “save”, etc.
Easier Data Export
I’m, admittedly, a weirdo who sends their LM data to their instructor all the time. The Garmin Golf app is pretty good, but it’s a little kludgey to go into the app and export the range data. It would be awesome if the data synced with Garmin Connect so it was easier to retrieve the data on desktop/web.
Standby Too Soon
Another small nit: standby mode kicks in way too soon. It really feels like if I step away from the R50 for a few seconds, the screen becomes grayed out and I need to click the standby mode screen away. As far as I can tell, there is no option to change how long it takes to trigger the standby mode. It would be great to be able to have that not kick in for at least 15 minutes of down time. But also, what’s the point of the standby mode? The screen is still active so it’s not like it will turn the projector off or prevent burn in. Do we really need a standby mode at all?
Custom Island Practice
As many have requested before, I also think a “combine” mode would be an awesome way to practice and benchmark my game. Another practice mode that i’d love is the ability to create a custom island green at a custom target distance. So for example, I would love to specify I want a pin location on an island green (like Sawgrass or Coeur d’Alene) 150 yard away. And i’d either be able to specify how large the green/island is or be able to set easy, medium, and hard difficulties with corresponding island sizes. Bonus points for random island greens and distances that change after every shot.
Anyway, I hope these requests are taken in the spirit they are intended: usability tweaks to make a good product even better.
