User Experience Extends Beyond the Screen
My UX with Wahoo Fitness: A User Love Story
I’m a #wahooligan. I admit it. I own several Wahoo Fitness products, and I love them. From heart rate monitors, to cycling computers, to indoor trainers and more, their products excel at tracking, motivating, and helping exercise enthusiasts reach their performance goals. But their success isn’t based on the quality of their products alone. Wahoo has nurtured a community of fiercely loyal athletes by seeking to understand (and address) their needs and recognizing that the user experience extends beyond the product itself.
Know Thy Customer
Listening to and understanding your customer is one of the most overlooked steps in the product design process. On the surface, your product’s UI sounds like the most important way to satisfy your users, but that is rarely how they are evaluating the true value of your product. Certainly if the UI is so awful that one can’t even login, or do the most basic things, then it will scuttle any attempts to deliver value. But while the UI is the most visible part of the product, it’s not necessarily the most valuable. Too often it inappropriately gets the blame when users struggle to adopt or use a product (or the credit when they use the it). The point here is that we often make assumptions about pain points (and what will satisfy them) before we have real evidence. A nice UI might make the product look better, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll solve your user’s problem or deliver real value. The only way to deliver true value to your customers is to understand them. And the only way to do that is to talk to them — a lot.
The best customer-centric companies talk to their customers, synthesize what they learn about them, and create detailed personas to help better address their customers’ needs. These personas embody the voice of the customer and help us evaluate and understand their needs. Without the ability to understand the world from our customers’ perspective, we are just designing for fictional scenarios in a world born of our own biases.
Creating personas isn’t a one-off activity, and personas aren’t static artifacts. They’re created to continuously evolve and not only feed your product roadmap but also impact departments across your company — from product to design to development and all the way to customer support.
Personas come in a lot of different flavors and include differing levels of detail, but they all share a common characteristic — they are a fictional representation of your users that help your teams understand who they’re building for and what problems they are trying to solve. Obviously, I don’t have access to the personas that Wahoo may have created, but using the most recent USA Cycling membership survey as a proxy plus my own experience as part of their likely target audience, we can paint the following picture:
Demographic
- Mostly male (>85%), masters age 35+ (>63%, mean 39.5 years), primarily road cyclists (>65%)
- Over 48% have a household income >$100k (median $75-$99k). 59.4% are employed full-time
- Just under 60% ride 5 days/week or more
Behavioral/Psychographic
- Likely a member of a recreational cycling group or amateur racing team
- Will frequently participate in group rides, many of which include a social component like stopping at a coffee shop
- Enthusiastic consumers and users of technology. The smaller and more weight-efficient, the better
- Intensely loyal to brands and products and will regularly (even unprompted) share recommendations and good product experiences with teammates and friends.
- Will track almost anything — distance, speed, exercise time, heart rate, power, sleep, etc. Also likes to share all of this data across multiple channels (e.g., Strava, Training Peaks, Zwift, Instagram, etc.)
- Frequently seeks input/recommendations from others (teammates/fellow cyclists, product reviews like those by DCRainmaker) before purchasing gear or equipment
- Spends an average of $1,020 per year on bicycling accessories
Challenges
- Time, or lack thereof. Finding the time to maintain a regular training schedule of rides can be a challenge with work and family responsibilities. Cyclists will often carve out time at an insanely early hour just to fit in a ride. Wasted time fidgeting with devices isn’t an option.
- Connecting, managing, and maintaining a myriad of devices (often across brands) used in tracking activity. Cyclists will often employ multiple devices in the course of a single workout. Heart rate monitors, power meters, speed-cadence monitors — all play a critical role in the workout’s success. If one goes down, it can affect the quality of a ride (and increase frustration).
- Similarly, unifying data across multiple platforms — Strava, Training Peaks, Garmin, Wahoo, and the list goes on…
Armed with this information, Wahoo is nailing the full user experience with the products they build, the community they’ve curated, and the service and support they provide.
The Product Experience
Of course, if your actual product experience stinks, you are going to have a hard time creating moments of delight for your users. But Wahoo excels at doing just that— creating moments of delight within the product. In particular, I’ll focus on the ELEMNT Bolt bike computer.
Starting with the user onboarding experience, Wahoo has made it exceptionally easy to get from unboxing to riding in a short amount of time. They’ve decreased the time it takes users to start receiving value from their product by simplifying the process of pairing the device to an arsenal of Bluetooth-enabled devices that are used to track and collect data — heart rate monitors, power meters, speed/cadence monitors, and more. Wahoo has eliminated what has historically been a huge pain and barrier to getting started using a new piece of equipment. They’ve managed to connect the user with their “ah-ha” moment with great speed.
Once paired, users will discover virtually everything is configured via the Wahoo ELEMNT companion mobile app. Wahoo has recognized that the market in general and cyclists in particular are moving to mobile platforms and smaller devices to support more and more workflows. No device had previously considered controlling so much functionality and configuration from the mobile phone, and this is a differentiator for Wahoo.
Wahoo’s in-ride UI is also a big satisfier. Take the ever popular Strava segments whereby cyclists try and better their time vs. other cyclists (and themselves) on the same stretch of road. Segments are a way to make the everyday cyclist feel like they are racing for glory on the open road. Wahoo knows these are wildly popular among the ultra competitive amateur cycling crowd, so they created a screen dedicated to Strava segments right out of the box.
Wahoo’s clean display clearly shows a cyclist where she/he is relative to previous efforts on the same segment. A rider no longer has to memorize physical landmarks that mark the beginning and the end of a segment, and they no longer have to wait until the end of the ride to upload their ride data and see their results.
Post-ride analysis is made easy by an elegant and clean screen design showing a cyclist the results of their efforts.
A Community of Wahooligans
In 2014, the U.S. market for bicycles, bicycle parts and accessories was sized at a little over $6 billion U.S. This figure represents an increase of around $300 million over the previous year. Though bicycling may have faded as a pastime in recent years, it has grown as a sport. The gradual growth in sales of road bikes in comparison to the slow decline in sales of youth bikes suggests that bicycles are not seen as being just toys for children anymore, as the number of frequent adult cyclists has increased between 2000 and 2013.
Wahoo recognizes this trend alongside the growth of social media as an opportunity to spread brand loyalty by creating and nurturing a growing community of cyclists. Enter the Wahooligan.
Wahooligans are fitness enthusiasts who take, share, and tag pictures of themselves using Wahoo Fitness products. Wahoo features these pictures in a gallery on the company website.
Wahoo also has some fun with their community. As described in the section above on personas, cyclists are known for participating in group rides that often end up at a coffee shop at one point or another.
Instead of just capturing and displaying Total and Active Time, the ELEMNT companion app displays “Cafe Time” in the post-ride statistics. Very cheeky Wahoo. Very cheeky.
CX is part of UX
Products used to track and monitor exercise will eventually break down. Sweat, weather, and physical damage is expected. A great product with poor customer support misses out on an opportunity to built brand loyalty and lifetime customers.
Unless you are Abraham Lincoln, dropping your device from just below the waist shouldn’t result in a crack.
Over the years I’ve owned several heart rate monitors from Wahoo. These devices are bathed in sweat with each use, and they rarely get washed (ew!). Over time, the sensors, contacts, and/or straps begin to break down and need to be replaced. Nothing surprising here. But what about when your unused replacement monitor has issues — the chest strap won’t stay tight, or the sensor will not stay closed. Wahoo has replaced several heart rate monitors over the years with no questions asked. Not earth-shattering for an $80 piece of equipment perhaps, but the speed and ease with which they willingly replace the device matters. They recognize that there’s a customer on the other end trying to follow a regular exercise plan that relies on tracking heart rate. They respect (and capitalize) on the OCD tendencies of the amateur cyclist, and I appreciate that.
I can’t think of a single piece of cycling equipment I own that didn’t first begin with a question to my expanded cycling community. A simple Slack message to our ~80-person strong cycling team or a question during a group ride carries great weight. “Can anyone recommend a good [INSERT PRODUCT]?” is an oft-repeated phrase among our tribe. Simply put, cyclists are intensely loyal to their brands and will give an endorsement (or bad review) at the drop of a cycling helmet. We don’t even need an invitation. Just the other day I shared an unprompted positive Wahoo customer experience with my teammates.
My first ELEMNT Bolt developed a crack inside the screen a little over 2 months after purchasing it. OK, it didn’t actually “develop” a crack — I dropped it. My bad. I contacted customer support with my story. Following a mountain bike ride, I dropped my device in a gravel parking lot from just below waist-height. I picked up the device, brushed it off, and immediately noticed the crack (not my “new” Bolt!!?). Wahoo’s response? “Unless you are Abraham Lincoln, dropping your device from just below the waist shouldn’t result in a crack. We’ll send you a new one.”
Customers don’t mind when you make mistakes, they mind when you don’t fix them.
That’s it. End of story. Customer satisfied. Wahooligan status confirmed.
Do you have a UX love story?
I’m sure my experience with Wahoo isn’t unique. Each of us has a favorite product or service company that has managed to nail the full user experience. Let me know your favorite!
