Use the Space! (How it is vs how it could be)
AnsweredHello,
in general I am really happy with my Karoo and especially the new light mode Update brought good visibility Improvements, but I am growing quite frustrated with bad usage of Space, overlapping UI Elements and a few other things. Especially the elevation Profile Is in need of major overhaul in my opinion, the competition is just way ahead there.
Here a little comparison Picture I made of how it currently is vs. how great it could be:
Bad things currently:
- Loads of wasted space between Rows. I know this is to make Space for the constantly displayed Distance to next turn field, but I don't use it, don't like it and would rather use the space to actually see the elevation profile.
- Overlap of Drawer tabs and Distance at the bottom
- Unecessary Zoom Setting overlay that overlaps and hides the elevation profile. Same for the huge reset button. Neither of them are necessary, since zooming with the buttons is easy enough and I can see my zoom setting at the bottom.
- Upcoming Elevation Banner is not necessary and robs space. I know what I am looking at is an elevation profile and by the position of the dot I can tell wether it is upcoming or historic.
Improvements that could be made:
- Fixing all of the above (main point)
- Adding gradient color coding and especially a fill to graph. This was mentioned a lot of times in this forum already and I do not understand why this is not prioritised.
- Adding small Gradient overlay in the upper left corner instead of the upcoming elevation banner.
- Merge upcoming elevation and historic elevation graphs together. This is long overdue (mentioned a lot of times already and just does not make sense).
Rant is now over, keep the updates coming and thanks for the great support (Listening/Responding to customers)
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Agree 100%. Brought up similar topic before, so did others. It seems we are diluting the total number of votes over 3-4 separate feature proposal tickets, so it never gets to the top of the votes ranking. @Hammerhead: Pls check the total number of complaints received for wasting screen real estate so thoughtlessly - there's tons of users pushing for a more economic use of screen canvas. Border around the data fields is ridiculous. This has been criticized for months now, by so many people - but nothing's moving yet... :-(
Likewise for gradient color scheme, be it a (colored) line graph option (to save battery, maybe) or a filled one...
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I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like for some things (not times, but speed, cadence, power, etc.) it would also work to have 3 columns instead of 2. So that I could have speed/power/cadence in a row, and then on the second row distance/heart rate, and then the map.
More customization in the layouts would just be nice in general.
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Nice one David! Great to see the creative Input and you did a lot better on the graphics front than me :D
For me personally I would also like to have the option to make the numbers a tiny bit smaller to see more of the map, but what you proposed is still loads better than how it currently is! I especially like the bold font used, this was already proposed a few times:
So maybe upvote those posts as well :)
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@Yves Sabourin
You are correct, in my example the fields are indeed duplicated, i was just lazy to remove the second on. Since Gradient is the thing I am most interested in when looking at the elevation Profile, I figured I'd put that there. But other users needs might be different, so it is probably a good idea to make it customizeable.
I have gathered some Posts that suggest similiar or the same things for the elevation profile, some more than a year old! So this definitely seems like something that a lot of users are interested in and should be prioritised in my opinion.
https://support.hammerhead.io/hc/en-us/community/posts/1260802231630-Improving-Upcoming-Elevation
https://support.hammerhead.io/hc/en-us/community/posts/1500000091961-Usability-Suggestions
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Any Update on this from the Hammerhead folks? I would really appreciate if the bad usage of space and overlapping UI Elements would be adressed rather sooner than later.
Additionally I love the new Climber Feature, but the elevation Profiles are still as before(which means not so good). I would love if all the new features would be carried over there, or it would be possible to set the Climber elevation profile as a graphical data field.
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Hey All,
We have made a note of thee suggestions and we definitely do have similar improvements on our pipeline as well. However, our current priority is focused on bringing more stability to the core software & improving the existing features and bugs reported by our users. We do have aggressive goals to take care of visibility & legibility issues in the coming quarters of this year :)
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@Akhil, @HH dev team: Please finally acknowledge this is one of the ost painful points for us - get to finally work on it, pleeeease! 'Coming quarters' have passed, and nothing has moved forward with these requests - as you seem to be so much concerned about getting the basics right: This IS one of the top important the basics - making readability a clear and crisp experience! Importance is supported by our combined voting of near ONE HUNDRED VOTES!
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Hi Reinhard, we are sorry that this has not been actioned. The decision is entirely on Product direction and community input. I have passed this request to the team again, but this is the best we can do from the support side. Would you consider speaking with our Product Managers and designers on a video call, and hearing their side of the story? The link to schedule a chat session is present in the software release emails.
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Thank you Ali, maybe I'll check it - but just hearing from other people's voices that one of the most user-requested features will not be implemented will not make my frustration any easier to bear... Meanwhile, there's many competitors out in the field who seem to have more focus on fundamental features like readibility / clarity / making wise use of screen real estate... can only recommend to seriously listen to the community - we are living in times where jumping off one train and getting on board of another instead is happening quite easily... <shrug>
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Completely agree with the above. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen any updates which make a big difference to me and/or seem to have a lot of community momentum behind them. Disappointing. Especially as some are quite easy. Granted there is a lot in this thread but some of the basics such as Centering data fields shouldn’t need user input! Similarly there are lot of complex data fields being added without simple things like total height climbed / height remaining.
I don’t understand why you keep pushing video calls with users when there no longer seems to be much visible response to the user community en masse.
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Completely Agree. The fields UI is poor. Just look at the other fitness devices out there:
1) Poor use of space. The numbers could be larger by managing space better.
2) Centering- Why are numeric fields right justified rather than centered? My main screen has only 5 numeric fields (I want LARGE number to be able to read without classes. About 2/3 of the screen is empty. It's a waste of space.
3) Color- really poor use of color. Fields (HR and Power, for example) could be colored by the zone colors of the HS zones- See the Wahoo Bolt 2, Garmin Edge 1030, Stages Dash, Garmin Fenix 7 and Epix 2 watches. Pretty much everyone except the Karoo. How about coloring the elevation history with grade colors like in Climber.
4) More Graphic Fields- Both the Stages Dash and the newer Garmin watches have "thermometer" fields where there is a pointer that points to the current location in the workout zone and also have a numeric value. See the attached photo. These are super convenient and convey a lot of information in a small space. In the photo my PM isn't connected bt you can see the white pointer on the HR field. It moves to point to the correct place in the HR zone as the HR changes.
5) More History Graphs- like power vs time, HR vs time. Just like the elevation history except for other variables. Also color them by the zone colors.
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i just got the karoo 2 setup, coming from a garmin 530, and the first issue i noticed (and searched for), was the ability to center the data field titles and the data (numbers) themselves for each field.
in my opinion the right side alignment simply doesn't look good in any scenario, but *especially* using any layout with a large data field, there's about an inch of empty blank space to the left. it's just really ugly and frustrating to look at, compared to having the data fields and titles centered in each column. please enable users choose if they want to center the data fields and titles in their layouts!
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I will be speaking to the product team on Monday to try to understand why there has been no action on the UI front for such a long time. I have made new visualizations to showcase what bolder and larger fonts/icons, higher contrast as well as proper usage of space could do for the visibility and readability. I have also added a motion blur to simulate looking at the device in motion. Note the much improved visibility of the larger and bolder fonts/icons. If you have any more suggestions how to improve these visualizations or what to ask the product team, please reply to this post and upvote the original post.
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Interesting to hear, are they too large/bold for you? I am curious because you also seemed to be frustrated with the bad usage of space and liked my initial proposal. Maybe I can improve upon the visualizations before I show them to the product team for consideration. Thanks for your comment!
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