The Nike Fuelband SE

Still the best wearable device, but not worth the upgrade. 

(Reposted from the Sessions blog).

Last week Nike released its Fuelband Second Edition (SE). (SE=Second Edition, geddit?).

I was on the pre-order, excited to see what was in store.

I’m an avid Fuelbandwagoner, it’s one of my daily rituals. After 1.6MM+ Fuelpoints and 513 active days, it’s fair to say the Fuelband is really working for me.

Most reviews of the SE I’ve read so far have been PR-rehash garbage, with not a single passionate Fuelband user among the writers, so I thought I’d dive in and share my experience with the new SE from the perspective of someone who loves and knows the product.

NB: Still no Android support, so Android users can stop reading now.

The Short Version

Apart from a slight slimming-down and some subtle colours, this is very much the same device.

That’s a good thing. Form-wise, it’s still the best device of its kind.

The new button commands range from helpful (two clicks to see the time) to overly complex (long hold for Sessions tracking then click once to start…).

Most of the updates sit within the app with the introduction of:

• Sessions: Track each exercise session, then tag it by type. *cough* Sick name dudes.
• Winning The Hour: If you are active for 5 minutes in an hour you ‘win’ it.
• An array of new Trophies: Too many to list them all, but within ‘Trophies’ the categories are Hit Your Goal, All Out, Win The Hour, Epic Moves, Beat The Clock and Like A Pro.
• Groups: You can now create Groups within the app and share updates on your progress.
• Reminders: Every hour, you get a scrolling LED motivational reminder.
• Bluetooth 4.0: Constant connection = “real-time feedback”.

Overall, (and I’m avoiding nuance here), this feels a bit like a kitchen sink update. There’s lots of major new concepts and very little explanation. And all the minor grievances remain unchanged: patchy syncing, heinous log-in flows and invisible password convention requirements.

I love my Fuelband, but after a week with the SE, none of the new features feel vital or necessary. If you already have Fuelband 1.0, I wouldn’t recommend you buy the SE.

The Long Version (With Pics & Gifs!)

Colours

First and most obvious change: colours!

Nothing major, but a nice touch.

I went with Volt, Nike’s go-to colour since the last Olympics.

Fuelband is still the most stylish of the wearable devices in my opinion and the colours reinforce this. Physically, the only other change is a slight slimming of the device — it feels fractionally smaller on the wrist.

Button Command: Time

I use the Fuelband like a watch and it was frustrating to have multiple clicks to get to the time in 1.0. Fuelband SE requires just a quick double click to get straight to the time. Winner.

Button Command: Fuel

Tracking your daily Fuelpoints is made simple with just a single click.

You can keep scrolling through with successive clicks to reveal the ‘Hours Won’ (more on this later) and on the third click you’ll see the time.

Button Command: Battery

Holding down the button for ~4s will reveal the battery level.

Button Command: Connect Bluetooth

Holding down the button for ~5s will reveal the status of your bluetooth connectivity.

New Feature: Sessions

Sessions is a big addition to the Fuelband. Hold down the button to reveal the Start option, then click once to start your Session. You will get a count-down… 3-2-1 and your Session will start.

At the end of your Session, hold down the button to reveal the End option and click once to end your Session.

You’ll get see see your FPM (Fuel Per Minute) and the Elapsed Time since the Session began.

Then, you can navigate back to the app and tag the Session to classify what it was: basketball, running, baseball etc.

In terms of effort and reward, tracking your run on Strava (my benchmark for great tracking) is a much richer, more satisfying experience.

Once a Session is tagged, you can add a photo, a location, tag your friends and share to social networks.

For now, this part of the app’s a bit of mess. Adding photos causes crashes and then they frequently don’t save to the Session. You can’t edit the content of the share tweet so it ends up full of hashtags and unshortened links.

A feature you’ll either love or hate is that you can add the Nike+ logo and your Fuel score to the image attached to your Session. I like it… I think it’s a subtly brilliant distribution move on Nike’s part, but I’ll understand if you don’t feel the same way.

The concept of Sessions allows you to track your sleep too. You start a Session when you go to sleep and end it when you wake up. But this is such a rudimentary feature at this point that it’s not worth mentioning.

When compared with the Jawbone, the Fuelband might as well not be a sleep tracker.

New Feature: Winning The Hour

Great new concept. If you’re active for 5 minutes in an hour, you ‘win’ it. In theory, a really nice reinforcement to reward you for tiny slices of activity.

This adds a whole new dimension to the Fuel experience. You now have a range of ways to succeed with Fuel, outside of just going hard in the gym for 45.

In theory, I’m all for this kind of thing. In reality, it’s a lot of extra effort to think about it and beyond 3-10 days, I can’t imagine there’ll be many people still anxious to win every hour.

New Feature: Reminders

Closely linked to winning the hour is the Reminders feature, which gives you a scrolling LED reminder every hour to ‘Go Nicholas’… Unlike the Jawbone, there’s no physical experience, so these reminders are sometimes hard to catch, especially if your Fuelband is under a shirt or jumper.

Reminders are a nice, albeit limited addition to experience. You can set which hours you want Reminders in your settings.

New Feature: More Trophies

Alongside the new features are a ton of new trophies. But hang on… NONE OF THEM FEATURE THE ROACH!

Where has the roach gone? Is he OK? Has he been sent to roach-backpack testing hell?

The Fuelband’s new trophy categories include: Hit Your Goal, All Out, Win The Hour, Epic Moves, Beat The Clock and Like A Pro.

Clearly a lot has been invested in inventing the new categories, and then sequencing the availability of trophies in each. Certain trophies aren’t available until you hit a certain level of Fuel.

Sniff… Sniff… Wait! That smells like… “gamification”.

Blergh. I don’t buy it.

After a million Fuelpoints! One million! I didn’t get a single thing.

Sure, the little roach popped up. But he did that exact same thing when I did something that took almost no effort.

Here’s my bet — no-one at Nike knows if the original trophies were working — and to try and figure it out they created a ton more of them.

Here’s my second bet — more trophies isn’t going to mean more engagement. Even if you make them harder to get or more diverse.

This part of the experience has never been interesting to me, and in fact, wading through 5 ‘celebration’ screens every time I sync my Fuelband is painful (not Quora notifications painful, but close).

Groups

OK, we’re coming to the end here.

There’s Group functionality now. You can create a group from your Nike+ friends. The group gets a leaderboard and a timeline with status updates, ‘pinned’ post functionality, and auto-updates of everyone in the group’s activities and trophies. You can also ‘loudspeaker’ people (I think Nike calls it cheering). In the same way Runkeeper insisted on ‘Healthy-ing’ people for a long time, it’s a mistake for Nike to invent a new group affirmation. ‘Likes’ are well-established and ‘props’ are working for Lift and Fitocracy. Stick with what works.

New Bluetooth!

The promise of Bluetooth 4.0 is that your phone and your Fuelband stay constantly connected to send you feedback and motivation as you need it. This is a nice idea, many miles away from being executed. I’ve had a ton of trouble connecting via Bluetooth, getting logged out of the app and not having my Fuelband recognised. From an n of 1, it feels like there’s lots to do before this real-time feedback dream is realised.

Miscellaneous

Logging in is still a NIGHTMARE. If you’ve bought stuff from Nike online and you’re trying to log in to your Fuel account and you’ve logged in with Facebook Connect in the past, and you enter a password without a capital letter and a number… it’s just. a. mess.

This is a legacy issue, but one that’s so crucial to fix. Why spend all that energy on extra badges if I can’t even log in!

Add in patchy Bluetooth and an inconsistent syncing experience and very quickly, the good of all the new is washed away by the bad of old.

With so many major new concepts: Sessions! Winning The Hour! Sleep tracking! Reminders! You’d think there’d be a big investment up front in educating users (or, as Nike calls them, athletes) about these new concepts.

There’s not. I had to go to the Nike support site, download a PDF on how the new Fuelband works and I still couldn’t get to the bottom of it. I had to figure out all the new commands with my the Grade 10 Science class ‘trial and error’ method.

The battery life is meant to be better, but my Fuelband 1.0 required a monthly charge, and the SE has already had to be recharged once.

Fuelpoints are more accurate now apparently, but accuracy is relative. So far, I’ve perceived no real difference in the way Fuel accumulates for me.

There are acres of in-app detail here, from breakdowns of Fuel by late night, morning, afternoon and evening to comparisons to your age group (which for me anyway, seem waaaaaay off)…

A lot has gone into the new experience. Aesthetically, it’s flawless in the classical Nike way To all those folks who slaved away on those pixels through late nights, I salute you.

Overall

The Fuelband is a simple, beautifully designed, near-indestructible Nike watch that also gives me a simple way to track my activity levels in real-time.

For that purpose, it works brilliantly.

Everything else seems superfluous.

All the great, shiny new ideas lack a sense of coherence. There’s no vision for the future of the athlete here. It’s still a bunch of semi-wacky software-engagement-behavioural experiments, the outcome of which Nike likely won’t ever know, forced on a group of consumers who likely won’t ever really use them.

Behaviour change isn’t a feature. It’s a thousand tiny details, perfected over time. To get those details right, you need to be maniacally focussed on testing, shipping and fixing. That kind of singular product mania doesn’t feel evident here.