Product Designer, Fitbit, 2015
I expanded the notifications on the Fitbit Blaze to support any third-party app notifications. At launch, Blaze only supported Calls, Texts, and Calendar. To become more competitive within the product space, we decided to add the ability to receive app notifications on your wrist.
The Problem
We believed that the wrist screen did not serve the same purpose as the phone screen and therefore a one-to-one passing through of phone notifications to the wrist would not be a beneficial design.
What I Did
Competitive Research and Ecosystem Understanding
I began with competitive research to understand the existing implementations of extended notifications. I surveyed competitors, worked with engineers to understand the constraints that contributed to the design decisions the competitors made, and presented alternate paths to key stakeholders.
Through this process, it became clear that iOS and Android handle notifications very differently. This inconsistency between operating systems was a huge part of what we designed for and around.
Additionally, the fields on both iOS and Android aren’t consistently used. The categorization is not trustworthy. And our existing templates did not fully satisfy the data we were receiving.
Device Design
My task was to modify the templates to support notifications for email as well as any third-party app.
I worked with the visual designer for Blaze to modify the existing templates to be flexible enough for all the notification possibilities from third parties. This included creating a specialized template for email.
Consensus Among Stakeholders
Extended notifications required a significant change to the app experience as well. I worked with the design team responsible for the app settings to align on a strategy that fit within the Fitbit philosophy, but one that also would work technically.
This became a much larger effort, involving Program Management, App and Site Engineering, Firmware Engineer, and upper management. We collaboratively met with the various stakeholders multiple times and through multiple iterations until we were all satisfied with the plan.
App Design
The most important design decision made was that app notifications are turned off by default.
For iOS, the device suppresses notifications when they first arrived on your wrist, but logs the notifications to send back to the site and the app. The Fitbit app builds out a list of apps which can send you notifications. The user then opts in to the notifications they like.
What Shipped
Notifications from any third party, from Fitbit, and from the OS itself are now all supported on Blaze. The user can control which notifications they receive on their wrist through the mobile app.
Overall, our users were very happy with the added notifications from the apps they cared about.
For me personally, some of the most delightful moments have come from getting turn-by-turn directions from Google Maps on my wrist.