Case Study: Garmin International
Lead content design for Garmin Connect’s core features: Sleep score and sleep coach
My role: Senior Content Designer
information architecture | content first design | wireframing | localization | user testing
Background
We have new sleep technology capability from our European Physiology team (now known as our sleep coach). In its current form, the concepts are highly technical. But we know these are insights that users want if we can distill the science down into conversational messaging.
Problem
How can we integrate this new technology into Connect in a way that’s simple and meaningful for users?
Hypothesis
We need to seamlessly integrate the new content into our existing sleep content in a way that’s non-technical and conversational.
We need to add content without making existing content more difficult to use.
Challenge
Localization will be a challenge. The content briefs are highly technical and given by non-native English speakers out of Romania. The final content needs to be translated into the 35 languages supported by Connect.
Sleep is one of our most popular features, with strong customer loyalty. Any changes made here need to not disrupt any already loved feature.
Approach
1 Collaborate with marketing
I worked with marketing to establish a user-focused concept and name. We stopped thinking about the feature as “sleep need” and started framing it as “sleep coach”.
2 Create conversational content
With the physiology team, we created hundreds of versions of personalized feedback phrases. Users receive short, personalized, and conversational feedback phrase describing the main message.
3 Validate with user testing
We ran multiple rounds of usability testing to validate our new content architecture.
Very early iterations of content design
Impact
The overall customer feedback and sales response to the Venu 3 feature updates was overwhelmingly positive.
The product launch got an enthusiastically positive review from our largest independent social media influencer.
Learning
Not all feedback was positive. We saw some negative responses from long-time users in the app store.
In retrospect, we found gaps in our user testing strategy. Our usability testing was useful, but it wasn’t representative. Our sample audience for usability testing wasn’t as broad or as inclusive as we needed it to be.
Next time, we need more quantitative user testing from a more diverse sample set.
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