Gear Fit 2

Gear Fit 2 Pro

Overview

Sometimes, the best way to improve a product isn't through prototyping or pixel-perfect screen design. It's simply finding ways to listen to your customers and understand their experience better than anyone else.

Business Context

Samsung wanted to create a sequel to the Gear Fit 2 and needed to know how to make it better

My role

I was tasked with improving the User Experience

Design Starting Point

Improving the Gear Fit 2 would require discovering its pain points and problems.  However, we were resource-constrained. I didn’t have access to customers for user research studies, user feedback from our retailers, or customer support.

Decisions

I knew that I needed data, so I taught myself how to use a web crawler and used it to pull over 700 Gear Fit 2 customer reviews from a large online retailer.  I then categorized all user feedback about the product across over 100 discrete points, categorizing it as positive, negative, and neutral. During my research, I discovered a flaw that was causing either the catastrophic destruction or loss of the device. I presented my findings to the team, who elevated my recommendations to HQ in Korea.  

Final Design

As a result of my findings, and recommendations, the industrial design was changed, and a NATO style band was used with the Gear Fit 2 Pro.  When designing tangible products, balancing desire-inducing industrial design with practical functionality is a challenge, and we made that happen.

Impact

Samsung maintains the second largest market share for smart watches.
2M+ fitness watches sold to date