Strava
How can Strava be more social?
Strava's mission is to let athletes experience social fitness by enabling users to connect and compete with each other via mobile and online apps. Strava is great because it lets you get competitive anytime you have your phone with you by allowing you to track, analyze and quantify your performance against yourself and your friends using GPS. I'm a big fan of Strava but think that the app is only scratching the surface of its social fitness potential.
Disclaimer:
This is a self-assigned project that I pursued before I started working for Strava. I posted the original project on Medium, which led to the Strava design team reaching out to me about a contract position on the team.
Problem:
I tracked my 25 followers posts for a month and found that only 14% of their posts were group activities, meaning the post included more than one Strava user. I realize that some users may not log all of the group exercise that they do, but those numbers seemed low for an app promoting social fitness.
Goal:
To get more Strava users to exercise together. An increase in the percentage of MAU's that are grouped in activities would be a strong signal for success.
My Role:
Sole Product Designer.
Deliverable:
A new feature that includes 25 new screens in a clickable prototype at the bottom of this write up.
Process
Persona
To start, I developed a provisional persona to guide my early design decisions. Dave, outlined below, represents my assumption of the athlete that is interested in group exercise. If I had more time, I would validate this persona with additional user research.
Usability Testing
I then tested the usability of Strava's current iOS app on 7 cyclists and identified user pain points. As you can see in the image below, some significant patterns emerrged.
Since users already can communicate after activities by commenting on posts, I assumed that users searching for an in app messenging feature suggests that they are interested in communicating before activities.
User Interviews
To see if pre-activity communication was already being solved outside of Strava, I decided to do additional user research on athletes that regularly run or ride with in groups.
Similar to the usability testing, I captured all of interviewees' pain points and affinity mapped them. Again, there were some trends.
Feature Idea
After evaluating the interviews and the usability test findings, I decided that an event feature could be a great way to alleviate Strava user's pain and make the app more appealing to social athletes. In the mind map below, I have outlined the value that an event feature would offer to both parties.
Design stories
To account for all use cases, I did the "design stories" excercise, which entails creating an "epic", the feature idea, and then listing out every possible thing that a user can do in the feature. The list served as a valuable reference during the design process.
Wireframes
With all of the design stories in mind, I moved into wire framing.
Card Sort
I realized that the order of the input fields on the "Event Create" screen needed to be validated by user feedback. I decided to do a card sort with 5 different people that run and bike in groups.
Hi-fi Iterations
I then created hi-fidelity mockups. Many of the important screens in the feature evolved drastically throughout the course of the project. Below, I have provided screen shots that include explanations as to why I made certain design decisions.
From V1 to V2, my design decisions were informed by card sorting and informal feedback from other designers. From V2 to V3, my decisions were informed by a second round of usability testing on a new set of Strava users.
Event Create Screen
Upcoming Events Feed
Event Detail Screen
Final Takeaways
Based off of feedback from other designers and the usability testing, it was clear that V1 and V2 had some elements that weren't clear or intuitive. Most importantly, users struggled to find upcoming events, which were "hidden" under the feed modal. User feedback and Luke Wroblewski's article lead me to moving events into the tab bar.
I also received some feedback from former VP of Product Management and User Experience at Strava, Alex Mather. He said the event feed looked too much like the home feed which could potentially confuse users. This led me to adding an orange tag in each event that included the date and time on top of the map to make it visually different.