Flexibility at Fitbit: Brennan Browne '99 LS

A pandemic can make things difficult for researchers whose work involves meeting with people face-to-face in their own environments. It has certainly made the past year an interesting one for Brennan Browne ’99 LS, the head of UX (user experience) research at Fitbit.

Brennan leads a team of researchers who help develop new products. As he explains, “It starts with asking, ‘What should we go build?’ or ‘What should this thing actually do?’ and then gets into, ‘Is the thing doing what we intended it to do and can people actually use it without any issues?’”

To answer these questions, Brennan’s team typically sits down with Fitbit users or potential users, visiting people in their homes, spending time with them in their day-to-day lives, or bringing them into a usability lab to test new products and features. Brennan says that, with in-person interaction out of the question during the pandemic, “we had to totally reinvent the way we were doing a lot of our work.” The team turned to simple tools like Zoom to meet with people in real time, or asynchronous research tools like dscout, which allows people to participate in diary studies. For testing a new Fitbit device, instead of having people come into a research lab, the team hired couriers to ferry the device around town, sanitizing the prototype between uses. “In a world where face-to-face interaction is precluded, just the logistics of trying to do the work that we would normally do involved a lot of creativity and changes and workarounds and adaptability,” Brennan says.

The change in approach may actually have lasting benefits. “If we’re doing research in person we have some limitations on who we’re meeting with, who we’re talking with, who we’re including in our research studies,” Brennan says. “Most of the team is based here in the Bay Area, so most of our research includes primarily people from the Bay Area, which is not going to be representative of the country, let alone the world. As we’ve shifted to doing more of the research remotely, we’re able to include a much wider range of people who are participating in the research, which is a benefit and something that we’re probably going to continue doing even once we can do more research in person again.”

Brennan Browne '99 LS, right, with his Fitbit UX research team.

Courtesy of Brennan Browne

Fitbit had a busy year on the development front. The company created a section of the app that helps connect people to COVID-19 resources and launched a feature called the health metrics dashboard to measure respiratory rate, heart rate variability, and relative skin temperature, which Brennan explains “can signal that you might be coming down with a virus such as COVID-19.” Fitbit is also working to help companies use its technologies to help employees return to work safely.

Brennan’s path to Fitbit followed a gradual but natural progression. After graduating from Santa Catalina Lower and Middle School, Brennan attended Stevenson School and then UCLA, where he intended to study engineering. When he discovered the field wasn’t as interdisciplinary as he had hoped, he switched to geography and economics.

In his first job out of college, Brennan was a data analyst for a small company called Equilar, promoting good corporate governance through executive compensation. “I spent a lot of time creating and looking at spreadsheets,” he says. Equilar offered tools and products to companies to help them make decisions, and Brennan became interested in how to improve those products, and in how to better understand and serve Equilar’s customers. “That led me down the path to discovering that the field of UX research even existed,” Brennan says. Next, he found a job at a consulting company called Answer Lab, which specialized in UX research. A few years later, Brennan left to join Facebook, where he worked his way up to research manager. From there, he arrived at Fitbit, which aligned with his interests in health, wellness, fitness, and technology.

As we’ve shifted to doing more of the research remotely, we’re able to include a much wider range of people who are participating.

Brennan’s favorite part of the work is how interdisciplinary it is; in fact, he frequently returns to that word. His team works with others across the company, from designers and engineers to customer service and sales, and the researchers themselves have a variety of backgrounds and specialties. He notes, “It’s not that UX research is the center of the universe, but the nature of the role puts people at this exciting and rewarding intersection of all these different things.”

In a way, it reminds him of his time at Santa Catalina, which he attended from PreK to Grade 8. He recalls that the environment rewarded curiosity and wellrounded thinking, placing as much emphasis on technology as it did on science, math, English, and history. He has fond memories of “computer class,” where he learned how to use spreadsheets, played “Oregon Trail,” and created art using design programs. “I feel like now, the role I find myself in requires the ability to write, to understand technical details, to talk to people, to understand historical context for things. And it certainly revolves around computers and technology.” Brennan believes the breadth of his education at Catalina gave him the foundation for all of those skills.

A new chapter of Brennan’s work draws from another Catalina value—responsibility toward others—as his team spearheads internal efforts around diversity, equity (including health equity), and inclusion. “We’ve started to place a high priority on understanding how racism manifests itself in some subtle and not so subtle ways in the tech industry and how our team, we think, can help play a part in breaking down some of those barriers,” he says. The shift to remote research has already allowed the company to tap into the perspectives, needs, and challenges of a more diverse set of people, bringing more voices into the product development process. Brennan adds: “That’s been another positive outgrowth of the last year, being able to really talk about if Fitbit’s goal is to make everyone in the world healthier, what does that actually mean, and what are some of the barriers, especially when we say ‘everyone’? That whole domain is not necessarily something that’s in our team’s job descriptions, but user researchers care deeply about how we best serve our users, so it has been sort of a natural extension of that. Personally, I’ve just been really proud of the team and humbled by all of their work.”