For me it isn’t instant readout of number of steps I want but timed information. How long have I been on my outdoor walk and what is my pace?
The first action on my daily walk is to touch the exercise complication on my watch and start the outdoor walk option. (Followed by Control Centre and putting the watch into swimming mode to prevent false touches from clothing causing the exercise to pause.) As I walk I raise the watch to look at the duration and the pace.
For the moment the pace is only for information but as my knee rehabilitation increases the aim is to get it down from over 20’/mile to 19’/mi or lower as this will improve the Cardio Fitness metric, which currently has me in the “below average” range. I want that up to, at least, the average. Really would like it significantly above that level.
Step count is something for end of day examination. That my movement around the house and tofrm my office also acrues the step counts is incidental but still useful.
Otherwise all the collected data is for longitudanal analysis to check improvements. Annoyingly that analysis has to be performed outside of the Watch/iOS/iPadOS environment by exporting all collected data and using other tools (R for example) to collate and present everything. How such data can be displayed is discussed in the Quantified Self forums at
albeit that those forums are less active than here but have the benefit of also being Discourse based so no new user interface to master.