A Love-Hate Relationship with My OURA Experience

My wife and I purchased our first Oura rings (Gen3) back in May and July of 2022 as a replacement for our Google Fitbits. It’s been over a year now of wearing this latest health tracking device. What has developed during that time is a solid love-hate relationship with what I’m calling My ŌURA Experience.

Let’s start by highlighting the strengths of this product, focusing on the hardware first.

What I LOVE about my OURA Ring

STRONG SLEEP TRACKING

Oura has definitely nailed their sleep tracking feature! I think it does a pretty solid job recognizing your sleep patterns along with a half-dozen related contributors to calculate a sleep score. I haven’t done any side-by-side comparison with other products, but I don’t feel I need to. My Oura Gen3 consistently tells me enough to know if I should change a bad habit or keep doing what I’m doing. I won’t be surprised when Oura obtains a few accolades for being the best sleep tracker out there.

IMPRESSIVE DURABILITY

I also love the durability of this Gen3, never taking it off for any kind of outdoor activity or blue collar work that needs to be done. From hiking, scrambling and bouldering to gardening, moving dirt and shoveling gravel. I have worked on several handyman projects with a variety of tools, and not one bit concerned about damage while wearing this health tracker. It is on my finger 24-7.

PERFECT FORM FACTOR

Along with its durability, I love the form factor of the Oura Gen3. Approaching this health tracker as a ring is so much more convenient than collecting data from a watch. I already have a GPS watch that I like for hiking. I also have a few nice watches for date nights that I won’t give up …and I certainly don’t want to wear a watch to bed every night. So it’s easy to see why I like this form factor so much better.

Without a doubt, the hardware engineering side of this equation is where Oura shines the brightest.

What I HATE about my OURA Ring

Ok, hate is a pretty strong word, but I needed one word to encapsulate the things I am irritated with, frustrated by and confused about my Oura Experience — mostly on the software side of this equation.

With every new update released to the Play store, Oura keeps saying they’re working to “improve your experience by fixing bugs”. Unfortunately, that remains to be seen for me and here’s why.

NO STATS UNDER LOW BATTERY CONDITIONS

This smart ring will will stop recording your sleep stats if the battery power gets lower than 23%. In my opinion, Oura should capture everything as usual until the battery is completely dead. That means, if I wake up to only 1% remaining, I should expect to get sleep stats downloaded for that night.

POOR ACTIVITY TRACKING

While I think Oura’s sleep tracking is impressive, I would absolutely not agree with anyone singing praises for this ring’s ability to track activities! The ring won’t recognize me doing an intense hike for 8 hours, but it will capture me sauntering around the grocery store for 30 minutes as I pick up snacks and drinks for that same hike. Or it will recognize that I casually walk my dog 3 times a day for 10-20 minutes, but captures nothing from playing hockey for an hour. Go figure.

MISSING TRACKS FOR OTHER ACTIVITIES

When my ring detects an activity and calls it “Walking”, it displays the GPS tracks for the trail I took. Love that! However, if I change that activity type to “Snowshoeing”, the tracks are gone. Why does the activity type matter? If location data was captured — regardless of the activity — show it!

UNABLE TO EDIT PAST ACTIVITIES

Speaking of activities, why is a user prevented from editing an activity in the past? At the stroke of midnight, bad data becomes a pumpkin! Again, I ask… why? What difference does it make if I change/correct data a day or two or even three days later?? When I participate in an activity late into the night, and can’t get to editing/correcting the details before the clock strikes 12, it becomes bad data.

Here’s the Use Case:

I played a hockey game that started after 10pm. It wasn’t over until 11:40p. When I rushed to manually add this activity before the app-imposed deadline, I made a mistake and somehow entered a duration of 25 hours. Doh! My mistake was only noticed after midnight and, as a result, could not be corrected.

A user should be able to edit a past activity… otherwise, the weekly report, seasonal report and any other like reports are all bogus too. Are you familiar with the concept of Garbage In, Garbage Out?!

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

Actually, I really don’t put a lot of trust into Oura’s health analysis when I can’t clean-up or correct my data. How could I when I know the data feeding those stats are wrong?

By the way, this issue comes into play again after coming out of airplane mode too. Whatever you captured while “offline” is what it is — no changes allowed.

RECENT ACTIVITIES ARE NOT ALL RECENT

When editing an activity, the list of Recent activities appear to not be recent at all. It’s August and I haven’t gone skiing since May! …but the yardwork never ends, I have been playing hockey this summer — despite Oura never detecting that automatically — and the dog still gets walked at least twice a day.

I also don’t need to see all 80+ activities Oura supports. It would be nice to add/remove activities from a per-user configuration. I know this is asking a lot, but I will never participate in 90% of what I see in that super long list. Activities like Badminton, Barre, Cricket, Dance, Diving, Finnish baseball, Floorball, Handball, Hula hoop? You’ll detect Hula hoop with hardly any hand motion but can’t detect Hockey?

Nice list, for sure, but scrolling through so many choices every time is just unnecessary noise to me.

LIMITED SUPPORTED WORKOUTS

With over 80 activities to choose from above, why are only 5 shown when I try to Record a workout?

Let me get this straight. Oura has never detected me playing hockey, does a spotty job picking up my downhill skiing days and really doesn’t do much better with hiking or snowshoeing. Likewise, I can’t manually record any of those activities yet I consider them all a workout. What am I not understanding?

INCORRECT DETECTION OF STILLNESS

This is a funny one!

My ring will detect a “nap” for the first 20 minutes of church every Sunday. Yet, a hard nap for 2 hours that same Sunday afternoon detects nothing. Yeah.

It also thinks I’m “napping” while watching TV or sitting still in a movie theater.

CAN’T EDIT NAPS EITHER

When my ring does detect a real nap, I can’t adjust that activity’s duration for correctness either!

Here’s a side-by-side example where I can edit the duration for regular sleep but not a nap.

PICK A CLOCK, ANY CLOCK

Is it a 12-hour clock you’re going for or a 24-hour one? Whichever one you pick, JUST MAKE IT CONSISTENT! …or make it a setting that the user gets to choose, like you do for Units (Metric vs. Imperial). But to show both clocks so randomly is both frustrating and confusing. I do hate this.

In one scenario, the user experience is editing a workout in Military time.

In another scenario, that SAME workout is presented in Standard time.

There’s a similar inconsistency with making the user either enter a Duration or an actual End time.

I just don’t get it. Is anyone doing any Usability or User Acceptance Testing there? What the heck are your BETA testers reporting??

DISJOINTED ONLINE USER EXPERIENCE

Let’s move off the Mobile App Experience and on to Oura’s Online Experience.

There are four legs this wearable smart device stands upon online:

Their main advertising website at ouraring.com
My Account page at ouraring.com/my-account
A Membership Hub at membership.ouraring.com
Your sleep stats on the web at cloud.ouraring.com

My problem is how disjointed these three different, but related, experiences are for the end-user.

1. THE MAIN ADVERTISING SITE

Let’s start with the the main advertising site since that one is obvious. Ouraring.com is where you find everything you want to know about the product before making a purchase. Problem is, a customer becomes familiar with your web site and its associated address through this product discovery phase.

Once a user buys an Oura ring, they now go back to ouraring.com looking for account access. Sadly, there is not ONE single link in the top navigation area of the Oura website for users to create or gain access to their account. That is the first place a user goes to look. Why isn’t such a link made easy to find? We are all used to Log In/Sign In buttons by now. Put it right next to Shop Now!

2. MY ACCOUNT PAGE

Oura makes a user hunt for account access by making you scroll all the way to the BOTTOM of their website. Down there, you might notice “My Account“. That’s a terrible user experience in my opinion.

I consider myself tech savvy and had a hard time finding where to log in. It isn’t the obvious placement which frustrated me. Not to mention that clicking on My Account doesn’t take you to a log in page, but rather a prompt to enter an email address in order to receive another link to gain access your account.

Upon access, all you will find here is your purchase history and a link to their Membership Hub.

3. A MEMBERSHIP HUB

Guess where that link takes you… to a different log in screen! Now wait, didn’t I just sign in??

How bizarre… and this sign in will send you a code to enter before accessing your membership account.

Talk about over complicated and completely unnecessary.

Once you finally get into this highly secured vault of utmost confidentiality, the only thing you can do here is modify payment details, change the membership plan, view a billing history, change your password and cancel this membership. If you try to view your order status, you are taken back to the My Account page where you will have to login once again.

O! M! G!

But wait, there’s more.

4. YOUR SLEEP STATS ON THE WEB

We still haven’t gotten to the place where you can view your sleep stats on the web. For that, we need to go back to Oura’s main website… you remember, down at the very bottom of ouraring.com.

Oh look, another login screen. How convenient …and what should we expect from this sign in process?

Ok, this is beyond stupid. I feel like I’m getting bounced around link a rubber ball. Jumping through all these hoops for what. Are you seeing how disjointed the online user experience is here??

So this is what you get at cloud.ouraring.com (the “cloud” reference here makes me chuckle).

At least this leg of the ŌURA online experience attempts to bring in one of the other legs of this animal, managing your membership. However, that activity still redirects users to the Membership Hub.

I really hate this overall user experience. It’s like four separate entities implemented these solutions that collectively represent ŌURA’s awful online experience.