Polar Flow - A failed experience

For a company making some of the best training devices, POLAR sure does fail miserably when it comes to the user experience of their app Polar Flow App and the QA of releasing updates.

Leaving aside the fact that the application looks like it was forgotten back in 2015, and the ui is busy and lacks polish or hierarchy, they seem to not really care about testing their releases at all.

The latest app release notes mentions a fix for some of the pairing and sync issues with new devices. But I suspect they didn't do regression manual testing on some of the devices released last year. Like the Grit series. How do I know? It just so happens I am using a Grit X2, and it stopped sync-ing to the phone the same time they released the new application.

Generally speaking I am not this aggressive when criticizing and trying to understand how things work, but the bigger the company, the bigger the pressure on employees, and the less they care about the products they put out.

Funny enough, the smaller the company or SaaS, the bigger the care about the client, the quality of the product. Because when you're small, all you have is that product as a calling card. The care you have for what you build. Your name.

When companies grow, they can hide behind a bad roadmap, a strategic decision, or pressure from the market. And when clients compound, 10-100-1000 clients become irrelevant in the race for the latest thing at a scale of millions of customers that silently accept a bad service. And since there is this whole discussion about taste is all that remains, when you stop caring about your customers, it does tend to leave a bad taste in their mouth.

You might say, but that's a mistake, it doesn't mean they don't care! Let's digest this for a moment. When you, as a company do not offer any type of support for people to use other than a FAQ page and a lot of hoops only to get to the contact section that points to the local vendor, that tells me a couple of things as a UX professional:

1. You are trying to save money by not offering support (phone, web or even chat). Otherwise, why would you make life especially difficult for people to try and find how to submit bugs for your application?

2. If you are offering support, you are intentionally or conveniently hiding the links to reduce the number of people calling, so you can cull staff because "there was no need", thus increasing profits. Because hey, sweet capitalism.

Heck Polar doesn't even list a forum for users to tell them "hey, your janky release just made my device unusable" or some generic support@polar.com email.

If there is anything that pushes my buttons is this mentality of "I want to eat the whole cake and have some left too so I can sell it off for profit."

Funny enough, the dumber the device, the better it works. I have a polar chest strap that I got in 2019 or so, that still works just perfectly today. Zero issues. Just swapped out the battery and kept going perfectly.

This just goes to show, the minute services enter the chat, the minute people can’t stop salivating about profit, instead of actually committing to the full responsibility and accountability of what it means to build a product.