The Fitbit is a screen with a button on a wrist band. You can press the button. You can wear (or hold) the wrist band. You can touch the screen: you can tap or swipe the screen.

Two terms that I will be using someone interchangeably are menu and display. When you look at the face of the Fitbit (the screen itself) it is sometimes providing you information (display) and sometimes providing you a menu of options. As I explored the device the line between display/menu became a little blurry (if I can tap the screen and it changes what I can see, is that a menu or a display?).

To interact with the Fitbit display you can tap, swipe, or press the button. There are some indicators of the options available for interaction with the Fitbit, but not always: there are some icons that you can tap, but some that are just providing you information, there are some screens where you can swipe up/down/left/right but some where doing so does not change anything.

In my experience over the past few days of use, you do get used to what the device can do and how to interact with it. However, I still find myself swiping on menus that don’t change, and tapping on icons that don’t produce an effect. I found there are some patterns of indicators (number of dots indicating the number of menus you can swipe through, some arrows indicating you can swipe up, and even some text instruction to press the back button when I fiddle to long on a screen that doesn’t produce a result), but ultimately you just have to keep using the device.

To learn to use this model of Fitbit you could follow an exhaustive tutorial that indicates every single option (I tried, but ultimately failed, to diagram all of those options). But, it would be easier to gain a general understanding of how you can interact and what responses you can expect from those interactions. I have explained the main important interactions below.

You can press the button.

There is only one button on the Fitbit. It is found on the left edge, I refer to it as the “back button”. When you initially press this button it will bring you to the “Home” screen/the watch face of the Fitbit. Pressing the button on the Fitbit has two functions: activating the screen or ‘stepping back’ to a previous menu when you have ‘tapped’ to get to a new menu.

You can ‘tap’ the screen. 

Tapping can take two forms – I describe these as

• Tapping an icon: an image that looks like it will bring you to another menu/the next option in a menu. The ‘tapping’ action cannot be undone, when you move to a new menu there is a new set of options to select, instead you can use the back button to return to a previous menu in the cases where you have tapped an icon to move forward.

• Tapping to “scroll” doesn’t change the menu (see how it is still showing the time/date on the screen?) but does change what information is being presented. In these cases you still cannot ‘untap’ but you can continue to tap to move through all of the display/statistics options. Pressing the ‘back button’ in cases of tap scrolling don’t move you back a step, but take you to the original menu.

You can swipe.

Up, down, left or right. In general, if you swipe up to change the view, you can swipe down to go back and the same applies for swiping right or left.

If you imagine that you are swiping to “pull” content from a direction, then the swiping direction makes a bit more sense.

Swipe up to pull the next display up or to ‘scroll’ through options.

Swipe down to pull the next display down or to ‘scroll’ through options. There seemed to be relatively few cases where there are displays that you swipe down to view, it is more often associated with a list that you can ‘scroll’ up and down through.

Swipe left and right to explore more options. In many cases the Fitbit will display some number of dots at the top of the screen as you are swiping left or right. The number of dots indicate the number of menu options. For example, below there are 3 menus to select various options from.

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