That Fitbit rant
801 words | ~ 4 min read | Jun 19, 2020 | last modified Jul 1, 2020 | design disability
While we’re at it, here’s another design rant that’s been percolating within me like a fine wine.
So, I have a Fitbit. Due to my chronic illness I need to keep an eye on my (unusually high) heart rate, which is why I originally bought the thing; it turns out to also be very useful for tracking my sleep. I do not give a shit about weight loss and I actively do not want my Fitbit to tell me about it; in the past I’ve experimented with tracking calories and I very nearly gave myself an eating disorder, so I do not want my exercise tracker to talk to me about weight.
The Fitbit and its app, at seemingly every opportunity, want to talk to me about weight. I’ve configured the homescreen of my app to remove “calories burned”, food logging, and weight tracking, which is all the customization I have in my control. However, for my current device (the Inspire HR), I can’t select a watch face that will show me my heart rate and the date without also showing me “calories burned”, and my device doesn’t support custom watch faces. When my heart rate goes above 100 BPM (which frequently happens while I am sitting down doing nothing), the app helpfully informs me that I am in the “fat burn zone”.
The last iOS app redesign now shows me “tips” when I launch the app, which I can’t disable, only close as they appear. Lots of them are about weight tracking, calories, food, and weight loss, and even in the ones that aren’t, diet talk sneaks in. Today I was informed that “Keeping a healthy sleep routine is like maintaining a good diet – every day counts.” Once I tried their “Intro to Healthy Habits” guided program, in the hopes that it would remind me to do an exercise occasionally, and it mostly boiled down to sending me push notifications about food tracking and weight. When you get started with this program, you have to pick a goal weight. This is, apparently, the only possible “healthy habits” goal Fitbit thinks you can have.
I’m not the only person with a Fitbit who uses it for something that the designers didn’t seem to expect. For example, I know of a disabled person with mobility issues who uses the step counting/step goal feature to warn her when she’s taken too many steps, because she can cause herself permanent injury by going too far over the limit. But the weight thing seems pretty egregious: lots of people struggle with disordered eating, which can take many forms, including compulsive exercise and calorie tracking. I am not arguing that Fitbit should remove these tracking capabilities entirely; however, Fitbit is actively alienating people who have struggled with disordered eating by not allowing its users to disable all mentions of weight and calories.
And that’s not even getting into the weight-science aspect. I’m definitely not an expert here, and diet/nutrition science kind of seems like a mess, but there’s evidence that losing weight and keeping it off long-term isn’t possible through diet alone, and there’s a “fat overshoot” effect that can cause you to gain more weight than you originally lost (possibly due to the starvation response). As with everything biological, weight and body composition is regulated by a nasty, complex control system whose precise behavior is dependent on your genetics, and which is interconnected with all the other complex biological systems in weird ways, and which isn’t very well-understood, but which we insist on trying to mess with anyway. So, personally, I think that the responsible thing for Fitbit to do would be to make sure its users are at least a little bit aware that there’s more complexity here than a straightforward calories in -> calories out model, and stop implying that permanent weight loss is not only possible-and-desirable-for-everyone but also so easy that their little wristwatch can help you pull it off. (And IMO trying to lose weight is probably not a good idea unless you really know what you’re doing and have done a lot more research on weight science than me.)
Anyway, my solution to the “pushiness” of the Fitbit WRT weight loss has been to use the Fitbit app as little as possible and slurp out my data using the Fitbit API. Which is obviously not a solution that’s accessible to your average non-technical user. And even for a technical user like me, trying to implement OAuth2 to Fitbit’s satisfaction is pretty annoying (especially since the docs are inconsistent about what flavors of token you can use with the “Personal” app type). But damn it, I’m going to build my own Fitbit data viewer just so I can avoid having any contact whatsoever with the app that Fitbit has designed.