Latest Garmin app update ruined my home page

Having said all that, I WILL SAY that I am so far VERY HAPPY with the Fenix 7S Solar Sapphire I received from Garmin, as a replacement for my 6S Sapphire that has been troublesome for quite awhile. 
Garmin has treated me more than fairly with faulty devices, even beyond warranty, and I AM a fan of Garmin devices, in spite of having had to deal with issues with every one of them; Garmin has supported the devices and supported me in every case!

I also very much disagree with several comments that have been made about who owns Garmin watches or ever will. I don't know the numbers, nor really care, but I do know that a LOT of the people I interact with use and depend on them and expect to continue purchasing more as years go by. And even though my wife is anything but a dedicated runner or cyclist, she uses her Fenix 6S every day and it's been a great asset to her to track her hikes and upload to Strava, far easier than having to have the phone do those things. (She is NOT a Connect user and probably won't ever be, since I do what little needs to be done in that area for her.) 

KrapfenKringel said:

You can also be "annoying" on social media and involve media and influencers to create public pressure

True. You could become a social activist / pseudo corporate terrorist. I guess my ethics didn't extend far enough to consider that.

I've never participated in Beta software; just not willing to spend yet MORE time making something work, when a company (like Garmin or whoever) certainly ought to be doing that and making better choices about such RADICAL changes.

I haven't yet figured out what is and is not available anymore, but it is MORE than frustrating that things get bounced around, added, taken away, moved, etc more often than is reasonable. I was pretty much happy with the former homepage and found it really simple to use and navigate. I could go to the site, see what I wanted to see pretty quickly, and then move on. Now I'm starting all over again. 

If you're listening, Garmin, WE DO NOT WANT TO HAVE TO RELEARN YOUR APP/WEB SITE over and over and over again! We have BETTER THINGS WE WANT TO DO!

DouthatBiker said:

PLEASE COMPLICATE THE PROCESS FOR ME! 

PLEASE HIDE THINGS FROM ME! 

PLEASE PUT MORE STUFF IN MY WAY WHEN I'M TRYING TO DO THINGS! 

Bro, let me tell you something about product design from someone who actually does it. When a company is a doing a large UX refactor like this, they analyse metrics (emitted after each action you take in the application / product) to determine use patterns. They look for ways in which they can increase usefulness/satisfaction/engagement with the application or product by doing things like reducing the number of touches needed to get to commonly used parts of the app, or by simplifying customisation in order to get the most useful elements up and in front of the user. This is what I believe Garmin have done.

As a dev, you can't sit around polishing the app / product forever, so your first iteration might enhance the experience for 95% of your customer base and leave the minority out in the cold with reduced or changed functionality that annoy rather than satisfy. You'll satisfy these customers in the future with additional app updates following another round of metric collection to see where the gaps are (e.g. how much of us are driving 3 levels deep into the menus in order to get content that used to be on the home page).

It's not personal. No one's trying to ruin anyone's experience. It'll change if enough people want a certain thing.

DouthatBiker said:

If you're listening, Garmin, WE DO NOT WANT TO HAVE TO RELEARN YOUR APP/WEB SITE over and over and over again! We have BETTER THINGS WE WANT TO DO!

This is life my friend. Those who can adapt to change, prosper. Those who can't, struggle. The same applies to businesses like Garmin who for whatever reason feel a lot of pressure to refresh the app - likely to align with the UI of FitBit and Apple Health to attract new customers. Wait and watch what's happened to the app over the next couple of months. If nothing changes, you'll know you're in the absolute minority. If there are wholesale changes, you'll know that Garmin have realised they've upset too many people.

DouthatBiker said:

never participated

No need to participate (really, participating was useless, your feedback would not have mattered), but it is a warning that a huge change is coming. But yes if you are not active in the forum that beta was easy to miss. They added more and more people that got a popup message in the app to try it out, but even that is easy to miss if you discard it because you just want to quickly edit your activity at the moment and later forget about that. 

KrapfenKringel said:

No need to participate (really, participating was useless, your feedback would not have mattered), but it is a warning that a huge change is coming

Heh, no, beta participation is about collecting use metrics. The way you use the app says more than any written feedback you could give.

Most of used to take a short look and switched back to the original one because it's crap (and left a written note about it), how is that for feedback?
Also how would you collect use metrics on things that aren't there to be used anymore?

KrapfenKringel said:

Also how would you collect use metrics on things that aren't there to be used anymore?

They had your usage from the old app. E.g how many users customised the layout. What widgets were in what order. You might have been in the 0.5-1% who customised the layout and perhaps Garmin figured that they'll get around to satisfying your use case in an app update 6 months down the track. I don't know their reasoning, but I trust they'd have a good explanation for it given the size of the company.

Designing for the customer who puts the least amount of effort into the product is not a good philosophy, it's a lazy one. If that's the roadmap the whole IQ app system is probably the next thing to go. And who even needs other activity profiles than running, only a minority does other things.

KrapfenKringel said:

Designing for the customer who puts the least amount of effort into the product is not a good philosophy, it's a lazy one.

From my experience, most customers don't want a lengthy learning curve before they're able to be productive with the product. You ideally want to automate as much of the baseline setup as possible, get the "oh this is sweet!" response, but then continue to offer customisation for the power users. Garmin have covered off the easy onboarding / setup use case with the first release and I'm guessing they'll iterate on making it more customisable with future updates.

If there's something we can agree on though, it's that Garmin's communication with its community is utterly abysmal. All of this should be explained in a newsletter / forum by a Garmin media rep.

KrapfenKringel said:

If that's the roadmap the whole IQ app system is probably the next thing to go.

I'd say very few customers even know what ConnectIQ is, but its absolutely critical for Garmin's future strategy with LTE. We'll hopefully see the likes of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp messaging come to the watch, and these will all be built upon ConnectIQ.

I get your point though. In my area of business we "cull" legacy cruft quite a frequently which upsets a tiny minority of customers, but it's essential in order to reduce the operational overhead which frees engineers up to work on new product.