Garmin Connect syncs, tracks, and analyzes health and fitness data from a Garmin device, covering activity, steps, heart rate, sleep, stress and body battery, and can sync training plans from other apps onto the device.
Homepage
The homepage displays the day’s scheduled activity, if any, then a carousel with sleep score, body battery, running, and all activities, and below that, four boxes for heart rate, steps, calories burned, and intensity minutes. This visual hierarchy works well, clearly surfacing the metrics an active person would want. However, the All Activities and Running cards show virtually the same thing if you only use one sport. This is a conceptual model mismatch: the app assumes multiple sports and doesn’t easily let you customize it down to one. My recommendation is a single-sport filter that collapses the redundant card. The date markers are also odd, showing a rolling range that doesn’t align with how training weeks are counted. This is a mapping problem: a raw date range forces a mental translation step a “This Week” label would avoid. Garmin should replace the raw date range with a “This Week” label. Strava already uses both fixes: an activity-focused toggle and a “This Week” label instead of raw dates.
Sleep Score
The sleep score is one of the first things you see when you open Garmin Connect, showing a score, a grade (poor, fair, good, excellent), and a sleep stage graph with no key explaining what the colors mean. Tapping further gives narrative text and then scrolling brings the user to a wall of stats. Some, like Avg Overnight HRV at “89ms,” are niche and give no benchmark for good or bad. This goes against Norman’s principle that feedback should be full and informative enough to let the user evaluate it, widening the Gulf of Evaluation: effort is needed just to translate a raw number into good or bad. Garmin should add context lines and a benchmark range for what each metric means. The number of metrics shown at once could also be reduced or grouped by importance, since seeing them all together overwhelms the eye. The key that accompanies the graph when expanded should also be on the Homepage.
Training Sync
Garmin provides its own training plans, but people often train with other apps and sync those plans to their watch through Garmin Connect. The sync itself works reliably, credits Runna clearly, and places a clear icon in the upper right to send the workout to your watch: good discoverability, since the action is easy to find. Once tapped, the system confirms directly that the run is ready, which is good feedback. The synced run itself is displayed poorly, though: no visual hierarchy, a text-heavy layout, and the pace target rendered in the same size, font, and color as Garmin’s own data storage policy. This is a mapping problem: visual weight doesn’t correspond to importance, so nothing signals what actually matters. This could be fixed with more color and separation, larger text for key numbers, and finer script for policy text. Runna’s own workout preview does this well, using bolded pace targets, separation, and color to define each step.
Heart Rate
Heart rate is tracked day and night, showing the full range it moves through. The graph gives a continuous waveform view with activity markers for walking and running. This is Norman’s feedback done well, tying the number to the activity so it means something without extra effort. The homepage widget, though, shows a color arc (gray, blue, green, orange, red) around your current heart rate. This is a feedback and discoverability failure: a key only exists if you tap into 7d/4w/1y, and even then it labels just two of the five colors. This widens the Gulf of Evaluation, leaving you to infer what the number and colors mean. A fix would be a key directly on the arc, plus a more complete one on the full heart rate page.
Conclusion
Garmin Connect has the potential to be a single place where your fitness and health data live and inform you, but design flaws get in the way. Gulf of Evaluation and feedback issues run through both Sleep Score and Heart Rate. You’re shown results with no way to interpret them. Mapping issues run throughout too: information is provided without the visual hierarchy to show what’s actually important.