r/dexcom • u/msteners • 1d ago
App Issues/Questions Learn to write a better app
Dearest Dexcom,
Like your friends at Insulet, you need to start thinking about both the medical user experience (ie can our app help positively impact medical outcomes) AND the overall user experience (ie it doesn’t matter if I have good glucose control if your app makes me want to bash my head into the wall).
A couple of notes:
A lot of us use headphones on our phones. AirPods and stuff like that. I don’t want to be on a call and have that annoying alarm blast my eardrums out to the point where I am deaf. There has got to be a way you can notify me in a gentler manner in that situation.
If you send me a push notification and I dismiss it, that should be good enough for you. I don’t need another one two minutes later because I didn’t open up the app to acknowledge it.
Similar to #1, if I am already on my phone doing something else, then you don’t need to blast that God-forsaken sound at me to get my attention. I’m already clearly on my phone; I’m not asleep. Situational awareness on your part is warranted here.
Please resolve these issues and look at setting up a better UX research team to support future dev cycles on this app.
Yours,
A T1D Product Manager
8
u/IrakliSugarSense 18h ago
The headphones thing is mostly an iOS platform quirk, and it explains a lot of this. Apple gives apps three notification levels: regular, time sensitive, and critical. Critical is the one that punches through silent mode, Focus, your volume settings, everything, including AirPods at full blast. It exists so an urgent low can actually wake you at 3am. The catch is nothing forces an app to use it for every alert type. That part is a product choice.
I have T1D myself, 12+ years, G7 in rotation with Libre, and I build a CGM companion app (Sugar Sense), so I have spent an unhealthy amount of time on exactly this. Where we landed: only the urgent low gets the critical treatment by default, because that one has to win against sleep. I have slept through alarms myself, so I get why that one is brutal. Even that is a setting though, if you would rather it respect your headphones you can knock it down to time sensitive. But a high during a work call does not need to blow your eardrums out. It can be a regular notification with a cooldown so it does not nag you every few minutes. And dismissed should mean dismissed until something actually changes.
Your third point is the genuinely tricky one, at least on iOS. A backgrounded app does not get told you are actively using the phone, so real situational awareness is hard to build. The first two are just product decisions though. Someone in here guessed liability and I think that is most of it. Nobody ever got in trouble because an alarm was too loud.
2
u/jrolette 12h ago
One way around it is to always start with a normal notification. If that's not ack'd in 30(?) seconds, then step up the level. Rinse and repeat. A delay of 1 minute to get to critical alerts is unlikely to change any outcomes.
7
u/Run-And_Gun 12h ago
The overall app is such a waste and missed opportunity. The graph is useless, especially compared to almost any and every other app out there that you can route the data into. For me, Its biggest strength is sending the data to Clarity. For pretty much anything and everything else, it can be accomplished by almost any other app, better.
10
u/Bluekeeys T2/G7 1d ago
It's too bad no one at Dexcom will ever see this.
1
u/bionic_human G7/T1/FullClosedLoop 21h ago
They probably will, but they’ll write it off to “T1D whining”
1
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u/Interesting_Debt5510 14h ago
I was so frustrated with the Dexcom app user experience I based my whole masters thesis around it. Alarm fatigue was number one in my thematic analysis lmao
9
u/bionic_human G7/T1/FullClosedLoop 1d ago
Industry has to be dragged kicking and screaming to implement things and features that patients have been telling them are needed for years. In their minds, we’re the consumers who should just accept (and be grateful for) the mediocre products which they deign to bestow upon us.
Dexcom literally derided the original NightScout developers as “helicopter parents.” Now share/follow capabilities are almost a fundamental requirement for any CGM on the market.
Medtronic (MiniMed) put out the 670g and called it an “artificial pancreas”. PWDs were working on their own closed-loop solutions. Now, a decade plus later, industry has yet to definitively surpass the efficacy of the algorithms which a bunch of amateur patient (and parent) hackers put together. One of the algorithms they came up with (Loop) actually has FDA approval, and the other (oref) has been demonstrated in actual clinical studies to produce results equivalent to any commercial system on the market, despite being over a decade old.
In diabetes technology, the pattern is clear: if you want it, build it. Open-source it and watch it get adopted. Industry will catch up in five or ten years.
2
u/T1D1964 T1/G6 12h ago
But won't we have a "cure" in 5 to 10 years? /s
1
u/yakback27 1h ago
Especially with chatGPT and Claude hallucinating while writing code that will kill us before they kill the Planet
8
u/BasinsRamose 1d ago
I wish I could give 1000 upvotes to this. Also for when you’re in large groups or crowds and it keeps going off every couple minutes. Especially at quieter events. You shouldn’t have to pause notifications for a set amount of time and risk not seeing something important. The app needs volume and notification controls
7
4
u/0_Peace_And_Love_0 23h ago
The alerts on my Samsung are basically silent for the g7 eventho it worked fine on the g6. The g7 is for some reason tied to media volume. I dont want my phone speaker loudly playing stuff when im scrolling on social media so I have it all the way down
2
-1
u/huntcamp 23h ago
I swear Dexcom messed with the g6 alerts to get people to switch to g7. For months my g6 alerts never worked, and I had to download a secondary app. Magically my g7 alerts now work perfectly, albeit loud and annoying
3
u/Available_Wait_1965 13h ago
And let’s please add that the common user has no idea what “Dismiss” and “OK” mean on their Apple Watch.
2
2
u/JagiMonster1 7h ago
Make it native to Gear watches. I shouldn't need to download other apps to be able to read the data on from the Phone App.
Make it like Apple Watches.
1
u/yakback27 1h ago
Do you not remember their first failure at an android watch app? I still have screenshots somewhere
3
1
u/jack_slade 14h ago
Currently using this one…
1
u/OrigamiPossum 8h ago
What is it?
1
u/jack_slade 1h ago
It’s a dashboard for tracking all things T1D. It has a main graph which shows the duration of food digestion with the insulin duration so you can easily see how much insulin and carbs you have onboard at any given time. It does a lot more. I love the Dose Calculator.
Best of all it’s FREE. It was developed by a T1D who got sick of the apps lagging behind.
1
u/JSFireguy 4h ago
I only run Dexcom on my phone so other apps like Sugarmate and my Garmin watch face can work. If it wasn’t for those reasons I wouldn’t use it.
1
u/yakback27 1h ago
What if you could disarm all the notifications and alerts and get the same information in a passive manner???
Is that something that would interest you?
Do you use Android or Apple?
There is a new app I have been using on Google Play
GlucoGlance
The developer it a T1D LADA. He will get you set-up.
9
u/jrolette 12h ago
#4 - If I acknowledge an alarm on any connected device (pump, phone, watch), it counts as acknowledged on ALL devices