Why a 5 meters test is a good test ?
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This post is not any suggestion on a Suunto watch but just to illustrate that some times we cannot read Suunto screens and there are some place for improvements
If you move at 5 meters from your computer and you look to the above screen shot of wind guru, what are you able to catch from the top or the bottom …
I hope you will agree with me that …
- You will not be able to read any figures, they are too small
- From the top, you have an idea that there is some good win at beginning of this week but no idea about magnitude
- in reverse from the bottom, you better see the days & night, the magnitude of wind and even if you do not see the figures you can guess their strengh thanks to the curve and the colors …
All that to say …
Move back from 5 meters when you judge a screen
** Examples of screen where another look&feel could ease the reading **
I will add some examples during the coming days/weeks/Months
For each of them, just move back at a 5 meters distance from your computer screen and see what is the screen you better see and on which you are still able to get valuable informationSuunto plus weather screen
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@mister-pyc while I understand where you’re coming from with this suggestion and do agree with your conclusions, I want to say that your design looks quite a bit different from suunto implementation. And it would be odd for suunto to “break” their design language for a single screen. Thus, they would have to redraw and rethink possibly every single screen in their UI so that it looks coheasive. And, as was already mentioned bigger fonts won’t be suitable for every language. So it could be difficult to implement.
But it’s still great that you raise the attention of the brand to the font problem and I can imagine, they’ll come with some kind of sollution sometime in the future.P.S.: Conserning font difficulty. I myself would suggest to just work on english font as most users either use english or could use english if that would boost visibility.
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@dmytro said in Why a 5 meters test is a good test ?:
sign language for a single scr
Hello Dmytro good to hear about you again. hope holidays were excellents !
What I will try to do : I will create a web place where I will recreate a suunto 9 screen and its logic but with my suggestions so that you can better visualize them (will take some time but I think it could be interresting)
I’m not trying in any manner to break Suunto logic and approach which by the way I like a lot, this navigation up/down, left/right is really super easy when you practice it … far easier that what I saw on a garmin … instead I’m triing to remain in the exact same logic
The way I’m thinking is the following
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can I do exactly the same (I mean with exact same computation and fields) but presented in a different manner that may bring some improvement. is it not the example of the above Suunto plus weather screen ?
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can I use the same principle than Suunto is using but reorganizing differently …
some examples here
- from the main screen, the middle button could have brought you not only to the “textos” but directly to a compass, an altimeter, a weather screen and an alarm setting which are already existing screens
- from the main screen, changing the order of the screen when I click on the bottom button to access faster to the altimeter …
I agree with you that starting from a empty paper and completely change all is absolutely not a good approach, rather if we start by what is existing and just proposing some slight changes in the exact same spirit of all what we observe, then it should be easier to get it.
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@dmytro said in Why a 5 meters test is a good test ?:
P.S.: Conserning font difficulty. I myself would suggest to just work on english font as most users either use english or could use english if that would boost visibility.
Just an additional reply on the font size.
There is an international langage which exist !- the numbers
- the icons
Less we use words, easier it is
In many places you can remove some text, which allow to gain space and hence enlarge the font,
Example :
What is the interrest to recall me that I choose UTC+3:30 ?
I know this by heart because it was my choice to see the Indian time, so remove it and enlarge this time. the most important is the time itself not to recall me that I choose which time some
Also and important, when the user put his own words, then just remove the “official” suunto terms and keep only the user ones
more space means larger font possible …Example :
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Jep, a better visibility is totally needed!
The screen itself is hard to read without sun. Even the backlight is kind of not the best - nicely said.
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With small screen on watch there is not much possibility to include larger fonts. I believe that your proposal can help with readibility for people with bad vision but it will looks very bad. I don’t have experience with Far-sightedness but for Near-sightedness i have glasses witch solve my problem perfectly. Isn’t that possible to solve with propper glases?
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@tomas5 Humm I disagree.
2 reasons here-
I recently compared a GARMIN Fenix 6 with my Suunto 9 Baro and what I observed is that the Garmin fonts are bigger, still the screen is exactly the same
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These big fonts already exists on the Suunto, try the watchface I was showing here, then just tap the screen to change the second info to display, you will see that the altitude is in a medium font already ~2x bigger than the second timezone time … and … the date displayed is even bigger ~4x time
Now … to display a time it is a 4 digit information (2 for the hours and 2 for the minutes), … so … the display of the time is already a 2 digits information which is centered … just put the hours and the minutes the one above the other and you get it naturally …
Im’ not kidding just look it is even bigger to what I suggest
All is possible in IT
Driven by you fear you stay on the ground, driven by your dreams you fly -
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@theguyfromthesummit One think is sure … I hope the next Suunto 10 Baro
will have a bigger and far much brighter screen like we can find on some watches still with a correct autonomie.
It could be a very big marketing argument here. -
Hi. Correct me if I’m wrong but it seems you have been able to manually go in and adjust the font size, boldness etc. So would this not actually be solving your problem?
I personally wouldn’t want the big lettering, I like things how they are now and have no issues at all reading them (I am in my mid 40’s so maybe my eyesight hasn’t started to deterioate yet). Just yesterday I was out running in the hills in the dark and could see all of my data fields while bombing down hills no problem. I can’t think of any instances where I would be trying to read my watch from a couple of metres away let alone five metres - it’s either on my wrist or not
I do like what you have done with the weather screens at the top of the thread, but for me it no longer looks like Suunto. It looks like I’m looking at a Garmin or COROS, obviously just my 2c. Thanks
SV Titanium Solar Forest
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no no no !!!
It is a painshop work on, my computer just to illustrate my dreams
I just took a screenshot and then did all the job on my computer with a old paintshop tool + powerpointBelieve me … there are conditions where large fonts are very interresting. as I just wrote in another post (here https://forum.suunto.com/post/88448)
today I was on sea in conditions : 30 knots, waves 1 meter, navigating back during ~20 minutes in a zodiac from a first kitesurf course … I tried during approx 5 minutes to setup an exercise with a POI on the nautic center, jsut for the pleasure to see the compass working …
well … it was mission impossible … i never was sure about whith POI I was looking currently as it was too small, too dark and with wind and sea spray in the face …
we are not always in perfect conditions and these are these ones we should considere -
@miniforklift concerning the weather screen … if you find proposal n°2 too much garmin or coros oriented … in that case what about proposal n°1 which is just a reorganisation of the pure suunto display with bigger fonts and a stable graph axis. ???
Im’ just trying to get an allied -
@mister-pyc
Yes, for the weather I do think your Proposal 1 is an improvement although I’d prefer to stick with Suunto’s original choice of green colour. Nice job
SV Titanium Solar Forest
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@miniforklift hop hop hop … the color does not matter I took the classical green of a powerpoint curve, for sure it could be the suunto one
the most important here is that the weight of the line is too small currently making the readibility some times difficulthere the same proposal 1 with a more suunto green color
for the graph and also the small thermometer.By the way on my watch I noticed that I see only the curve but not the “light” green below the curve, hence why I did not reproduced it in my screen shot
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@miniforklift After having tried it again just now, I agree that the bargraph is more coros or garmin oritented but it has an additional advantage the more it goes into yellow the more you are in anticiclonic situation, the more it goes into the blue the more you are in a depression situation … so it is super east to catch the trend.
Hence why I still prefer the proposal n°2 … if we were havign a watchface configurator may be it could have been an option of the screen so both of us could have been happy -
@mister-pyc I agree With you, that some small changes would have a big impact on readability. Comparing the Fenix 6 (Not x) some months ago to the S5 - besides having a bigger screen diameter of 1.3 to the S5 with 1.2 - same run, pictures taken within a few seconds , (Garmin right, Suunto left wrist) you can see that the much „bolder“ fonts are much easier to read
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@chrisa Despite I do not want to do any marketing to Garmin or Cronos. I’m just a Suunto 9 baro user, which by the way I like a lot and hence I’m faithful to this trade, I should confess that this is a perfect demonstration of why biggest – even fat – fonts are far better.
The target should be the readibility of info, hence efficiency.
Even Garmin could have put bigger font … removing Distanz and Time text which after few hours of use you will know by heart or put a small gif to represent than which btw will avoid any translation …All is possible in IT
Driven by you fear you stay on the ground, driven by your dreams you fly -
@mister-pyc although I understand your concern, I would say that if I was a product manager or engineer I would not likely think of looking at the device at 5km distance, because usually it is a much higher distance than the one of the regular use.
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@andré-faria Hello Andrea, May be I did not wrote enough correctly or you did not catch my point.
When I was talking about 5 meters … it was not too look the watch !!! but to look the screen demo that you could do of a watchface.A 1920*1080 computer screen is more that 21 bigger than the 320x300 suunto screen. If you forget this and you draw a screen on your computer, you may have the feeling that you did something excellent … but when you transfer your screen to the size of the watch and you go into normal conditions (not perfect ones that happen at noon sunny time) then your screen is becoming not so good.
Do again the exercise. move up to the post where I put the current suunto plus weather screen and my 2 proposals, display this on your computer, then step back from 5 meters and see what you can see … do you still see the suunto graph … me no, do you read the sun set time and its ETA or the temperature … me no …
tomorrow I will post a photo of this screen in a real sailing situation … you will see, this screen which has genius feature is becoming almost unreadableAll is possible in IT
Driven by you fear you stay on the ground, driven by your dreams you fly -
@andré-faria An additional reply …
This is when I was discussing with a Suunto boy that I realize this …
We were discussing the Suunto Plus Safe screen and he posted in his reply a screen short of it with this beautiful skiers …
When I saw it, firstly I was thinking … WHAT A BEAUTY !!! WHERE IS THIS MARVEL WITH THESE 2 SKIERS ON MY WATCH !!! then I look to reality … the screen shot was displayed on my 1920x1080 pixels screen whereas the watch has for the moment a 320x300 … so ~21 smaller …
Where the screen was a pure marvel on my computer, the same on the watch screen will have been a unreabable toy.
By the way … this safe screen even if simplier is also not easy to read, I will propose some suggestion here one day
OK Suunto boys and girls will finish to hate me, forced to read all my texts
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@mister-pyc well, if we’re getting technical, pixels may be of a different size, so it’s not a fair comparison. A fair one would be to equate the object width(e.g. watch screen)/distances to screen or monitor. In case of optimal distance of the watch to the wrist ~ 40cm and a watch width of ~ 3.3cm, we get a ratio of 0.08. In other words if one to do 5m test, the watch mock-up on the monitor should be about 40cm.
But, I think this still isn’t a fair comparison, since not everyone sees as good at longer distances, as at short ones.
However, I see your point!
I, personally, am lucky to be able to see my so s9 screen no problem, it would be cool though to be able to trigger a bigger font for the whole watch somewhere in the settings.
