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.
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.
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 →