Fixing the auto-save feature on the Garmin Venu 2

The following article is the text of a message I sent to Garmin to start a discussion about improving the UX for saving activities. 🤞

Garmin Venu 2Is there any way to prevent the Venu 2 from auto-saving an activity while I’m still working on it?

My old ForeRunner 235 would simply drop out of tracking mode and wait as long as I liked to restart the activity. This was fantastic for when I would stop for lunch on a hike. Or if I’d hiked or biked somewhere, wanted to stay x hours, but also wanted to record the hike there and back as a single activity.

The Venu 2 insists on staying active and auto-saves if I so much as brush a sleeve over the surface of the watch.

What I currently do to avoid the annoying auto-save is to lock the screen and then hope I notice when the watch threatens to auto-save my hike within 30 seconds if I dare to stop longer than 30 minutes.

This is quite annoying because I feel like my use-case is a pretty legitimate one. Is there any way to keep my watch from pushing me around about saving my activity?

There are several solutions I’d be happy with:

• Don’t use the touchscreen: Just stop auto-saving the activity. Don’t even try. Drop out of tracking mode after five minutes like the ForeRunner does. It’s OK. I’ll take responsibility for remembering to either continue or save the activity.
• Ask for confirmation: If you can’t stop the auto-saving behavior, please make the watch ask me whether I’m sure I want to save the activity and force me to press the hardware button (akin to how the “discard” behavior works). This would prevent inadvertant auto-saves (which sometimes leads to hikes split into 3 or 4 activities, which is just wrong).
• Just don’t auto-save: Just don’t ever threaten me with a 30-second countdown until the watch saves an activity. I don’t ever want to auto-save an activity in this way. Are you afraid the data will be lost somehow? Is it wasting power toa stay paused so long? Please find another way to resolve this (as I mentioned above, the ForeRunner seems to offer a solution).

One final thing: While the “discard activity” behavior includes a confirmation, the confirmation uses the same hardware button that you’d use to continue the activity. If you accidentally brushed up against the “discard” touch-screen button and then press the hardware button to continue without reading the screen, then you accidentally discard the activity. You could avoid this UX issue by using the bottom-right button (the “B” button?) to confirm discarding.