Garmin Connect Redesign

The Garmin Connect App provides a tool to monitor and review health-stats and as well as doing post-training analysis that were record with a Garmin Smartwatch. 

A big challenge for Garmin is that they have a very diverse user-base. While some users might only track general health data, others are training regularly and might be interested in in-depth analysis of their training data. Therefore the Garmin App comes with many functions which make it particularly hard to navigate the app, even for frequent users.

The challenge of this project was to identify the most pressing problems in the iOS version of the Connect app, to then create a redesign that improved the overall user experience. 

I asked myself four key design questions that were adressed in the redesign:

If you would like to see my methodological approach to this redesign, please have a look at the Case Details section.

Besides a visual makeover of the app there were two main areas where changes were made to improve the usability of the Garmin App:

Revised information architecture of the app
The different areas of the app were newly grouped and prioritised.

New My Day and Training Status Overview
The improved main screen now displays selected key health data metrics at the top and features a list of customizable data-tiles in the Today’s data section. More training specific metrics were moved in the newly introduced Training Status tab.

Considering the extensive market for smartwatches and sports watches and the diverse motivations and needs of users the redesign was tailored to a specific audience: dedicated recreational athletes. All design decisions were based on the results of a heuristic evaluation, a competitive analysis, and six qualitative user interviews with Garmin users.

In the first step of the project, the Garmin Connect app is analysed using a heuristic evaluation based on Jakobs Nielsen's ten general principles for good interaction design. Identified problem areas were to be seen as potential for the redesign and are also examined in subsequent user interviews.

Looking at the information architecture of the app reveals its complexity. The More Tab is the home of its extensive features and needed to be simplified. Blow you can see how important health statistics are buried in a list that doesn't even have a logical sort order (e.g. alphabetical), making it difficult to find the option users are looking for.

Further outcomes of the evaluation were, that the redesign should focus on a clear hierarchy which prioritises the main functions relevant to the target audience. Instead of coping with the apps feature overload by offering more customisability redundancies should be reduced.

In order to gain a broader insight into the market for wearable and fitness tracking apps, the apps from the two sports watch manufacturers Coros and Suunto, the health and fitness tracker from Whoop and the social fitness platform Strava were examined as part of the competitor analysis.



When analysing the apps, the basic concept of the respective app, the information architecture and the presentation of the collected health data were examined. In addition, similarities and differences with the Garmin Connect app were analysed.

To test the hypotheses set out in the heuristic evaluation I conducted six qualitative user interviews with Garmin users who can be categorised as ambitious recreational athletes. My interviees where two women and four men between the ages of 24 and 34. I split the interview guide into four sections:

In sections one and two, the focus is on the motivation and usage behaviour of the interviewees. In the third part of the interviews, the user-friendliness of the app was tested using realistic usage scenarios.

All interviews were conducted in person. To analyse the interviews, I used the software tool Condense, which allowed me to transcribe and tag relevant parts of the interview for later synthesis.

The results of the user interviews confirmed the observations from the heuristic evaluation. Three main findings can be identified:

The final redesign addressed the three main problems with the app described above by simplifying the information architecture, prioritizing the most used features and still leaving room for user customisation where it makes sense.



A look at the new information architecture shows how the removal of redundancy and the grouping of similar content has made it possible to get rid of the More Tab, which was often avoided by users due to its feature overload.

The My Day tab now displays selected key health data metrics at the top while still featuring a list of customizable data-tiles in the “Today’s data” section. The newly introduced Training Status Tab now visualises training-specific data that was previously buried in a long, non-visual performance statistics list.

I not only re-designed the four main tabs, I also improved the Workout Details screens based on what I learned from the analysis and interviews. I was able to reduce the number of tabs from five to four, update the overview page and the prioritisation and visualisation of the workout graphs.

Click through the prototype to get a better idea of the new information architecture and all redesigned areas of the app (PW: connect).