SUUNTO

Suunto creates physical and digital solutions to track, analyze, and share your every adventure. With innovative sport watches, dive devices, and a mobile app, Suunto is able to provide a full picture on a person’s activity and well being.

Business goal

Introduce over the air update to the new Suunto 9 Peak. Prior to this implementation, individuals would need to update their watch manually by connecting the watch with a cable to their computer. This caused many users to encounter issues that had already been fixed as they did not update their watch. With over the air update, individuals would receive the latest software update effortlessly and will be guaranteed the best experience.

Challenge

Create an experience that does not disturb the individual or cause any inconveniences to their day-to-day adventures.

ROLE

I conducted UX research and was the UX/UI designer working together with another designer, Android developers, and iOS developers.

Research

Before designing a non disruptive update process, we needed to identify when a user uses their watch. Understanding our users, we were aware that it was not uncommon for Suunto users to perform activities throughout the day and night. Due to this, we needed to create dependencies to avoid running an update during an ongoing activity or before any activity. Secondly, it was important to understand how individuals were currently interacting with update flows from other devices. Our goal from this was to learn how we can improve the process so that our users would always have the best experience with their devices due to the new software updates.

Design

It is no secret that individuals value flexibility and control when it comes to their day-to-day routine. In our initial designs, we created a flow that allowed a user to set a specific time for the update if the update was to happen at a time inconvenient to them. We found this to be more troublesome than beneficial as it required more mental thinking from a user for an experience that was intended to be seamless.

In addition to a seamless process, we also wanted to be transparent. We wanted our users to be aware of the status of their device every step of the way to allow flexibility and control. To do this, we implemented the automatic update to run after the necessary technical requirements were confirmed and during the night at a time we knew had the least amount of user activity. In the event an individual was to start an activity during this time, we provide them with a countdown to allow the option to navigate out of the update to avoid any unpleasant experiences. Depending on the update status, we provide two types of notifications. Each notification displays an informative message about their device status and if there was an error, we provide the user the sense of security knowing their device has all previous settings and software restored.

Although the main focus of the update is to be automatic, we also understand that there are users whom are enthusiasts and want the update as soon as it is available. To cater to these users and our internal testers, we implemented a menu item for manual updates.

Key Learnings

With the new over the air update, individuals receive the latest software updates effortlessly and are guaranteed the best experience. Working cross platform was an educational experience as it was important to learn how app-to-watch communication worked between different operating systems. Another aspect of this design I found interesting to tackle was the fine balance between being transparent, but also offering a seamless experience that reduced the amount of decisions from the user.