Karen Hears a Fit-Bit

Karen is an extraordinarily intelligent person. Karen used to work as a technical writer, explaining abstruse mainframe computer operations to obtuse computer operators. (One wonderful day someone told her to document the process of ‘taking a dump.’ I can still hear her laughing.)

Yet, each time that Karen encounters a new item of technology, you can set your watch, precisely, by the brief delay before she steps into a morass of terrible documentation and mediocre UX. Whatever it says on the box, ‘some assembly’ (by the family software weenie) is required.

My first memory of this was Karen’s first desktop Mac. It was gray and it looked something like:

I was naive. Knowing Apple’s great reputation for ease of use, I put the box down in her office space and invited her to open it up and follow the instructions. She would own the entire process from the start.

She opened the box. And she found the ‘read me first’ document. And the other ‘read me first’ document. And the other ‘read me first’ document. Each inserted into the box by some slice of Apple that had something to sell, and none of them offering any useful instructions as to what to actually do with the unit.

I sighed and proceeded to pull the pieces out of the box and put them together. I plugged in the keyboard and mouse and sent the power cord down behind the desk. I crawled under the desk, plugged in it …

And cracked my head on the top of the desk when the machine sprung to life and loudly ejected the plastic shipping biscuit from the floppy disk drive.

This pattern has never improved.

This time around, Karen heard about the wonders of a fit-bit from our eldest, Hannah. She researched the options, picked one out, ordered it up, and waited (with much less anxiety than I would) for its arrival. In the fullness of time, she opened the box and read the instructions:

“Install Our App on your Phone!”

She did that. She launched the app. The app offered two buttons and only two buttons. ‘Setup’ and ‘Login’. The use of ‘Setup’ led to a demand for the use of ‘Login’. Do you see what is lacking from this picture? Yup: no sign of a register button. Karen heaved the canonical sigh of frustration and put it aside until she could catch me.

— “What am I supposed to do?”

— “Well, I suppose you should visit their web site and create an account.”

— “Why don’t the instructions tell me to do that?”

This is a question on par with: “Why does the porridge-bird lay its eggs in the air?” Less politely, why does every single company fail to do even the most basic user experience testing, particularly for the experience of the new user? Grump, Grump, Grump.

After a bit more discussion along these lines, she heads off to the web site, and creates an account. In the last few months, we’ve switched her from using an account on our family Google domain to a plain-old-gmail account. (Why, You ask? Because my lovely employer has still not worked through the initial technical debt of building ‘Google Apps’, and many, many, things still don’t work if your account is in your own domain.)

OK, so, the old account is much quicker to type than the new one. We still own it, and email to it forwards to her new account, so why not use it as an account identifier?

Back went Karen to the phone to log into the FitBit app. Click login? It prefills with the account logged into the phone. Which is, of course, the new account. The UI makes it far from obvious that this is a prefill of a field you can edit, and heaven forfend that it should ask you which of the accounts on your phone you’d like to use. Back to the local tech support department.

“Aha,” sez me. “I bet we can make this easier if we just login to fitbit.com with your Google account instead of having an account defined by an email and password.” Sure enough, fitbit.com allows the creation of an account with a ‘Login with Google’ button. We do that.

Back to the phone. Does the phone app have a ‘Login with Google’ button to match? Nopes. On the phone, where typing is a pain in the fingertips, and a single click would be really valuable, it is nowhere in sight. You have to enter a password that you had to give the website even when creating a ‘Login with Google’ button. Note what company owns Fit-bit. Sigh.

Finally, we have logged in on the phone. And like Alice in Wonderland, having acquired the key to the door, we find ourselves too big to get through it. Once we’ve logged in, there is no longer a ‘Setup a Device’ button in sight. Some searching reveals it buried in ‘My account’: The ‘Add a Device’ option, presumably intended for people planning to wear one fit-bit on each extremity.

Now that we can finally set the thing up, the app finally mentions that it won’t set up until it’s been updated to the latest software. Oh, and it can’t possibly perform an update, even when connected to power, until the battery reaches 50% charge, and that may take an hour. “Can’t Make Me!”

I. Can’t. Even. (As my other daughter might say.)

Charge it up, you say? It comes with a charging adaptor with a 3″ cable with a USB-A connector on it. The very short cable presupposes that you’re going to plug it into a computer rather than a wall-wart; the magnet that holds the fitbit to the charger isn’t that strong, so leaving it dangling on a wall would not be reliable. In any case, there’s no wall-wart in the box. And her laptop, being fairly new, has zero USB-A connectors. Into my older laptop it goes for now.

The year 2010 called and wants its USB-A connectors back. A quick visit to the fitbit support site yields a smarmy support person explaining that fitbit can’t see any reason to accommodate its users by offering a USB-C option, even for extra money. Don’t you love the smell of burning customer satisfaction in the morning?

There’s no visual indication of the charge level; just a flat line reminiscent of a hospital tragedy. The app tells us to try again from time to time. We do. Each time we try and fail, it feels the need to deliver a notification, in spite of the fact that we are sitting right there staring at it.

Finally, enough electrons find their way, the update succeeds, and the device comes to life. Sort of. Up pops a notification, “You need to make a bluetooth pairing for all the functionality to work.” Not in the app, mind you, in the Android notification system. I fire up the Android bluetooth settings, ask to pair a new device … and find only the neighbors’ two Samsung TVs. Apparently, it had already paired on its own.

We’re not done yet. As Karen is working her way though the soi-disant documentation in the app, she finds an option related to notifications. It is completely ambiguous whether this concerns getting notifications from the fitbit on her phone, or notifications from her phone on the fitbit. Can you guess how enthusiastic Karen is about having a buzz on her wrist for IMs, emails, and ‘special offers from fitbit’? Not bloody much. Nonetheless, we travel down this path because we can’t tell from the Oracular pronouncement of the app which way these notifications will go. Only when we’ve dealt with a half-dozen security prompts does it become clear that we’re dealing with the wrong direction — and we have to go disable them all.

Those of you with iPhones may be snickering with self-congratulation here. For all I know, fitbit is one of those companies that prioritizes the posh minority over the hoi polloi of green-dotted plebians. Trust me, however: when our flavor of family cell-phone was Apple, we had just as many of these comic incidents. Our switch to Android had nothing to do with my employment with Google. It happened years earlier, when Apple made a set of changes to the calendar UI so gratuitous that Karen was on the verge of drop-kicking her phone into orbit. Well, OK, Karen would never drop-kick a phone. She would, however, explain to me in very precise detail just how dissatisfied she was with Apple’s decision to move every wheel of her cheese just to satisfy some designer’s urge to … I don’t know. What urges do designers have, anyway?

The fitbit is perhaps tamed. It’s Passover for another hour or two, so perhaps a taste of the bitter herbs of disappointment is seasonal. I can’t see any hope on this Easter Sunday that anyone is going to harrow this particular hell; I’m sure we’ll be visiting it again very soon.