https://uxplanet.org/simplifying-and-visualizing-big-data-7941821e648d
“Fitness,” “freshness,” “fatigue,” “form,” “relative effort,” “power,” “training load,” “impulse,” “peaking,” “power meter,” “heart rate monitor…” 🤯 My first month at Strava was full of new terms and concepts. And at the end of my second month, I was challenged with a project to bring the popular “Fitness and Freshness” feature, that helps to track levels of Fitness, Fatigue, and Form over time, from the web platform to the mobile platform and make it easy for users to understand.
Beginning in my second week, I was involved in user research, where I kept hearing new terms and concepts related to cycling and running. I had observed multiple sessions of athletes using features of which I had little to no understanding. I have learned a lot about how seasoned athletes track their fitness and form, how they deal with overtraining and injuries, and how much they adore Strava! 🧡 Many users already loved the Fitness and Freshness graph on the web platform, while others had never used it and were not even aware it existed.
Fitness, Freshness, and Fatigue are well-known concepts in the athletic world. How do you improve performance? How do you avoid overtraining? Am I properly rested? Fitness, Freshness, and Fatigue can answer all of these questions and help professional athletes to be their best. But what about casual athletes? Ones who run for fun — less-experienced or even beginners — who don’t have any athletic background and have never properly trained for a race?
The team conducted 8 athlete interviews with both new and power Strava users. All participants were Summit subscribers but had different levels of familiarity with the Fitness and Freshness feature.
Most of our assumptions were borne out during this initial research phase:
After we uncovered all of these issues with the current Fitness and Freshness feature on the web platform, we flipped the gap into a question:
How might we simplify the Fitness and Freshness concept to make it more appealing to different types of athletes while increasing discoverability and usage?
Defining the question was followed by a few brainstorming sessions and multiple ideation rounds. We wanted to introduce more people to Fitness and Freshness by bringing it to mobile and simplifying it to make it both more appealing and easier to learn to use.
To make the Fitness feature more accessible, we first realized that we needed to make it work for people without a heart rate device. “Perceived exertion” is a fairly common method for determining how hard you are exercising. It’s how hard you think and feel your body is exercising. This is a pretty subjective method, but it can provide a relatively accurate estimate of how hard you are working without needing a heart rate device.