Withings drinks the kool aid
Posted on Thursday, December 22, 2011 @ 12:16 CET
We own a Withings scale as well as the blood pressure monitor with the aim of getting healthier - being able to measure this stuff and see progress is a great motivator.
We logged in today to the dashboard only to see that things weren't working quite right.
Gone was the ability to scrub, and also the dates at the bottom were strange. "Aou" for August and two Septembers. I believe the first error is because its showing us the dates in French for some reason. The second I'm not so sure about.
The close button for the weight panel is also a tiny little "X" that you could select with your mouse. At which point it became apparent. They have HTML5-ified the dashboard.
So the question is why. To join the cool kids in the anti-Flash movement perhaps? Initially I thought well now it will run on my iPad, except they already built an app for that. Luckily all is not lost. You can click on the "Standard dashboard" link to go back to the old Flash-based one and scrub to your heart's content.
But this isn't about Flash vs HTML.
My problem with this is that they replaced their dashboard with one that does less, works worse and set it as the default. WTF dudes?
Lastly, if you resize your browser window it doesn't scale. And they call this the "Enhanced dashboard".
By all means embrace and play with new technologies - but the only direction to go is up. If the experience is not better then don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
My suggestion is simple: detect if Flash is installed, if not serve up the new dashboard. Otherwise keep the old one as the default until these issues get resolved.
- paulo
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Comments:
Hello Paulo,
I'm Julien from Withings and I would like to answer a few of the points you raise. The reason we moved from Flash to JavaScript is that JavaScript allows us to introduce a new feature that we couldn't make in Flash: the ability to import of data from other services and to display them as something other than curves. At this time you can import data from Runkeeper and Zeo into your Withings dashboard and we plan to add more services and devices in the coming month.
We have also introduced several other new features with this update, you can check this post on our blog for a quick tour: http://blog.withings.com/en/2011/12/22/a-new-dashboard-is-available-for-my-withings-com/
We will work in the coming weeks on clearing out the bugs and improving the look and feel of the new dashboard based on internal testing as well as feedback from users. We hope that ultimately you will come to like this dashboard and its new features even more than the old one.
Kind regards,
Julien
# December 22, 2011 17:24 CET
Thanks for the feedback Julien. I was not aware of the importing ability as we have never used these features. My reaction was based on growing comfortable with something that was working and it being replaced with something that is (currently) not working as well with no explanation.
I should have checked the blog but I wonder how many people actually do. I don't think an update was sent to users via email.
In any case, I look forward to seeing the dashboard getting better and better.
# January 05, 2012 00:55 CET
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