First of all, let me mention that I find the touch controls on Fenix 7 to generally be undesirable. However touch controls are incredibly useful on the map screen, allowing to quickly and effortlessly zoom and pan the map, and I use that very often.
I am thankful for the recently added "Map Only" option for the touchscreen. That's what I have set by default.
However there are still two issues that reduce usability of touchscreen on the map for me in a significant way - very often when I try to touch the map screen, the watch does other things - not what I expect.
1) Let's say I want to pan the map screen to see what's around. An intuitive way to do that is to touch the screen and move the finger in the direction I want to pan the map. However 9 times out of 10 the watch instead switches from the map screen to another screen. I want that zero times out of 10. I have disabled the touch controls leaving them enabled only on the map, which means I absolutely don't want to switch data screens by dragging my finger across the screen, yet my watch still does that on the map screen. I know that I am supposed to first touch the screen and release, and only then touch again and start panning the map, but that is not what my intuition tells me. I call that a usability failure.
2) Let's say I want to zoom the map, which I do fairly often. Until recently that worked very well. However with some recent "improvements" added by Garmin engineers I fail to succeed zooming the map about half the time, especially when I try to do that on a move. It seems that the area for the "+" and "-" controls on the map has been significantly reduced, and a function to pick a point on the map has been added. So, half of the time I miss the "+" or "-" and pick a point on the map. After that the map screen becomes unusable to me until I press the back button. I find myself having to press that Back button very often, especially when it is rainy.
The worst part is that the feature of picking a point on the map does not even work when "Map Only" touchscreen option is selected. Apparently, once a point is selected on the map, touch controls no longer work. Basically, nothing can be done in that state other than pressing the Back button.
What I really want to for the "Map Only" option to be limited to zooming and panning the map only. Furthermore, it would be very helpful to have a timeout for the touch controls. If I touched the screen accidentally or a rain drop touched the screen, after a relatively short timeout it should go back automatically. It shouldn't require me to have to constantly press the Back button.
Hence here is my question. Do real athletes test new Garmin features in real environment before they get released? Do real athletes provide feedback that gets taken into account. Increasingly, my impression is that the answer is NO. Pretty much every single map or navigation related feature that I try to use during my outdoor runs is buggy in one way or another, and many of these issues are fairly obvious.
