Feature proposal: Notifications during activities should be made optional

[logger]

@Olaf-Gottschalk Only three times weekly for twenty years. I always put my phone on silent as soon as I enter the studio. It’s not hard. And when people occasionally forget, they leave the mat and walk over to their phone and deal with it so as not to interrupt the rest of the class further. I fail to understand why this is not an option for you

[logger]

@Olaf-Gottschalk I guess what I was trying to say is: Yes, it would be great if the watch had every possible option for customization. I too would love that. In the real world, however, it has plenty of options for you to achieve what you want/need, it just requires the tiniest bit of effort and thought from you. As someone else said above, I’d much rather that development time was directed toward something else, in order to give the watch actually new features or capabilities. That seems infinitely more useful to me than providing an option that allows people to forget to put their phone on silent before a yoga class, but obviously YMMV.

[freeheeler]

@Olaf-Gottschalk
I’m frequently doing yoga and sometimes meditation when I feel like.
I do the same before a yoga session as I do when I have important meetings: activate DND in the watch and put my phone in silent mode.
I am absolutely pro customisation, but I am against overcomplicating settings and overloading the start screen. it has a lot of settings already now. it should be as simple and intuitive as possible.
it’s just my opinion.
but I understand your point. I am thoughtful in this case and have little understanding when watches and phones are ringing in an inappropriate situation… even worse: you’re invited in a 1:1 meeting and the other one answers a call during the meeting

[zhang965]

@Olaf-Gottschalk said in Feature proposal: Notifications during activities should be made optional:

When I criticized the lack of Emojis, the sport hardliners were mocking me because I want to use the device 24/7 as a “smartwatch” instead of doing “proper” sports. When I criticize that notifications during workouts can be very inappropriate, others immediately pop up to tell me I should just manually go to flight mode on my phone or disable BT - now I am too much into sports?

Lol, you are not Suunto target user.

[far-blue]

Apple has a concept of focuses and there’s a fitness focus. Given the notifications on the watch come from your phone it kind of makes sense to use the phone native notification management system so I’d suggest it would be a good idea for the SA to trigger the fitness focus when you start an activity and stop it afterwards. It would even be possible to control which kind of activities trigger the focus or possibly enable / disable different focuses for different activities.

[A Former User]

It is always very interesting to read how different habits belong to people and I have always been intrigued by the fact that some of us make our lives so dependent on these objects to the point of making them almost a reason for living. For me, family, work, yoga (for almost 40 years), outdoor activities are the “moment” to forget everything that is not essential in that single context and I certainly don’t want to let myself be guided by objects that surround me or that I wear. But the truth is that in the end it all boils down to this: YMMV

[Olaf Gottschalk]

@zhang965 said in Feature proposal: Notifications during activities should be made optional:

Lol, you are not Suunto target user.

That’s an interesting one.
Who is??

[Olaf Gottschalk]

@robis absolutely - this is my point.

Do we disagree? I don’t really get your point. Same here. When doing sports, I do not necessarily want to get any notifications - when NOT doing sports, the Suunto watch is exactly that: keeping unnecessary distractions away from me.

Phone is silenced always anyway, and the apps that are allowed to go through to my wrist are just the basic ones: phone, messages.

All other manufacturers at least allow to select whether notifications should be enabled or disabled during sports.
But Suunto does not offer this.

So people here tell me to manually go DND before doing sports… Really? This is not what I plan to do every single time I do sports…

[Egika]

@Olaf-Gottschalk I think everyone who can read got your point.

Now what to do?
You seem to have the urge, that everyone else is following your ideas how life and sports tech should be. This will not work. Everyone here has different needs and priorities (what we have seen in this and other threads).
There are people commenting on how they handle things. That is fine. No need to follow their approaches as well. Still it makes sense to acknowledge that the world out there is diverse. Your logic is not everyone else’s logic.

So the situation is: you like to have a certain feature. This has been well articulated. Others don’t see the need.
Both fine. Maybe that’s it…

[A Former User]

@Olaf-Gottschalk said in Feature proposal: Notifications during activities should be made optional:

So people here tell me to manually go DND before doing sports… Really?

DND is a catch-all option. I quickly adopted it for all my countless DND needs because it is simple and effective. I can’t think of a better suggestion.

[Egika]

@robis the OT does not seem to accept any other routine apart from his own idea (which needs watch software to change).
I am good with this, but think this is why we won’t progress in this topic anymore…

[Olaf Gottschalk]

@robis the next problem with DND is it silences all sounds - meaning during the workout you won’t hear interval or navigation or target sounds, right?

[Olaf Gottschalk]

@Egika I don’t have any urge that everybody follows my ideas. Why do you even say this?!?

I simply don’t understand the aggression that people seem to have when someone points out that simple things are missing. I don’t force anybody to need what I need.

What’s the point of this forum for you???

[Egika]

@Olaf-Gottschalk sorry, that was my impression from reading lines like this:
"So people here tell me to manually go DND before doing sports… Really? This is not what I plan to do every single time I do sports…"

Maybe I am wrong with my conclusion. Sorry for this.

In return, can you please tell me where you see aggression in the discussion up to here?

The point of the forum for me is to exchange opinions, ask questions and help each other. Plus of course like in this thread make suggestions and discuss them.
The point is not, to make sure everyone is on the same train.
So after “xy is missing and it is important for me” and comments like “true, same for me” or “not an issue for me”, what should happen?

[isazi]

@Olaf-Gottschalk I agree, and not just for notifications, it should be possible to set various features separate for activity and daily mode.

[Łukasz Szmigiel]

I’ve been wondering recently - is there a real benefit for Suunto for having this forum in terms of product enrichment (or simply feedback) if they have in app surveys that seem to be the main driver of changes (apart from testers).

[logger]

@Olaf-Gottschalk There really is no aggression here; people like myself are simply pointing out that you can already achieve what you want with a little effort.

That said, I think the problem in this and your other posts is your approach and tone; that is, instead of saying “hey guys, I have a suggestion for X, wouldn’t that be great”, you tend to say things like “the watch (and with it the whole company and all Finnish engineers) sucks because it doesn’t work exactly like I would like it to”. That kind of approach is going to get a certain kind of response in a forum populated by Suunto users, and perhaps a suggestion would be to adopt a slightly more positive attitude in your interactions with others in this forum. Anyway, just a thought!

[A Former User]

@Olaf-Gottschalk said in Feature proposal: Notifications during activities should be made optional:

I simply don’t understand the aggression that people seem to have when someone points out that simple things are missing

Speaking of aggression… well, a few posts ago you were not very polite (to put it mildly) with that sad sentence against developers (and nothing can justify it). And now, I swear, I will stop posting on this topic.

[Olaf Gottschalk]

@logger but the point is: the “little effort” you mention is not the solution to the original problem as you would have to act every single time before the workout and if you forget it, it’s over.

That’s makes it not a solution to the problem statement.

I am coming from other manufacturers, obviously. And it’s not rocket science to design features like notifications to a minimum requirement. Polar introduced them for the smartwatch side of things with being only available when not in a workout - which is a minimum step and perfectly fine.

When they then made them available during workout, boy did some people complain as to what a sports person wants with that during a workout… They shouted “I want to be left alone when doing sports”! Which is fair. This is why the user can choose whether notifications should be on or off during workout…

Now I was simply quite surprised that a watch from Suunto (which also targets sports enthusiasts rather than couch potatoes) does not give me the choice… That’s all.

And from an IT standpoint, as this is my job, it is extremely easy to implement such a toggle.

So when other users argue that the devs should do better things…I simply cannot understand them. Such a switch would have taken almost no extra time at all when defined from the beginning.

[logger]

@Olaf-Gottschalk There are many small things like this that I would like implemented on the watch too, and I don’t know why they haven’t been or if they ever will. All I was trying to say was that in the meantime, it doesn’t seem so bad to have to remember to turn notifications off before an activity, and if I forget to do that it’s easy to turn them off on the phone side of things. I also have to remember to start an activity on the watch myself, for example, rather than rely on the watch to do that for me. I dunno, it’s a fine suggestion, but maybe after it’s been made once it’s not really necessary to keep explaining at length how easy it would be to implement, not to mention complain that it hasn’t?