Overview
Fitbit Ace LTE is a connected smartwatch designed for kids, enabling them to communicate with parents and trusted contacts, stay active, and build healthy movement habits. This was a zero-to-one product that was launched mid 2024.
Team: Product Manager, Engineers, UX Researchers, other UX Designers, Visual and Motion designers
As a UX designer on the the Connections team, I worked on:
Onboarding: Helping parents set up the app, connect the watch
Communication: Designing the communication experience for kids, parents and trusted contacts.
Activity: Helping parents see their child's movement
The timeframe
Nov 2022 - Nov 2023
Role
UX designer
Onboarding for parents
Onboarding was a critical first touchpoint for parents setting up their child's Fitbit Ace LTE. I collaborated closely with engineering to understand technical limitations. Additionally, since kids' account creation was owned by another team, we had to ensure our flows aligned with Google's broader ecosystem.
The flow was broken into key sections:
1. Welcome & Login – Parents sign into their Google account.
2. Choose watch user – Assign the device to a child.
3. Terms & Privacy Policy
4. Subscription – Enabling LTE and activating features.
5. Confirmation – Parents complete setup and hand off the watch.
I focused on reducing friction within the parts of onboarding:
Designed clear in-context guidance to help parents recover from connectivity issues (e.g., Wi-Fi/Bluetooth disruptions).
Worked with engineers to create resilient error-handling flows, ensuring parents weren’t left without a clear next step.
Managing trusted contacts
To ensure parents could easily manage who their child communicates with while staying in control, we designed a simple yet secure contact management system. Granting access to trusted contacts - like grandparents or family friends - needed to be effortless yet secure, preventing unwanted communication while keeping the experience intuitive for parents.
I helped design a streamlined, intuitive contact management flow, ensuring:
Parents must send an email invitation that the contact must accept before being added.
A clear, structured contact list—separating parents (full supervision) from trusted contacts (call & message only).
Parents had full control to add, remove and block contacts easily
Visualizing activity
To help parents see how much their child was moving, as a way to both encourage healthy habits and reinforce that the watch was doing its job keeping kids active, we designed a simple, scannable activity dashboard that showed:
Daily move goal progress
Step count
Light and Active minutes
Impact and learnings
Working on a zero-to-one product at Google was a chance to help shape something from the ground up — for a space that’s deeply personal to families. My focus was on making the experience feel intuitive, secure, and reassuring for both kids and parents.
Some key things I took away:
I learned a lot about working across Google — especially with other teams building for kids and families.
Even though privacy of the product was a huge consideration, I saw how user testing was still possible. It helped validate things we couldn't assume, and gave insight into what really matters to parents when choosing a smartwatch for their child.
I gained a much deeper understanding of connectivity and setup — how things like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth disruptions affect the experience, and how important it is to design for recovery. Helping users troubleshoot on their own became a key part of the onboarding flow.
Overall, I learned how to design for real-world unpredictability while still delivering something simple, trustworthy, and fun.
What others are saying
"Calls and texts work through the Fitbit Ace app, but since I have notifications from the app on my phone, I don't miss them" - Wired
"This is a smartwatch for kids like no other. Everything from the sleek hardware to the slick software design is a notch above anything else out there." - Android Central
"The Fitbit Ace app itself is easy to set up and navigate, with a simple interface that shouldn’t be hard to work with, even for someone who isn’t very tech savvy." - Engadget
See the setup flow in action at 5:28 →