How can Strava be more social?
A feature idea through user research and testing
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: I am in no way affiliated with Strava. This is a self-assigned project that I pursued as a curious product designer, a Strava supporter and a cyclist that enjoys good company on the road. I am sure Strava has considered many of the things that I will later discuss, my hope is that my work will be of value to their team.
As a Strava user the last 6 months, I noticed that almost all of the athletes that I follow primarily exercise alone. For example, the screenshots below show that Derek’s Afternoon run was a solo activity and that Jessica Slocum’s North Face Endurance Challenge with 5 others was a group activity.
Strava recognizes when two people or more start recording a run or ride from the same location and are exercising at the same pace. Users’ posts in the app display the number of participants that were involved in the activity, which made it easy for me to track the rate at which my 25 followers were exercising with other Strava users.
Over the last month, I found that only 14% of my followers’ posts were group activities. 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
My goal was to get more Strava users to exercise together. Since Strava is a social network, I assume that Monthly Active Users (MAUs) is one of their most important KPIs. An increase in the percentage of MAUs that are grouped in a single activity would be strong indicator that my project was a success. If I worked for Strava, this would be my number one KPI. Why was this my goal?
- Group exercise can increase a person’s desire to exercise.
- Group exercise is safer than solo exercise.
- Social fitness can enhance one’s performance through competition.
- Competition can be fun and it can strengthen someone’s commitment to exercise.
In referencing the HEART framework, I discovered that engagement would be the best indicator of success for this project. which is also why I chose the increase in % of MAU’s grouped in an activity as my KPI.
How does this goal help Strava?
- Promoting group exercise will lead to Strava appealing to a broader audience that includes more social athletes.
- Users exercising together will lead to more logged activity which leads to an increase in MAUs.
- If users’ performance increase, so will interest in Strava, leading to more Strava Premium subscriptions.
- More group activity will lead to more word-of-mouth referrals.
With this in mind, I followed the full product design process to ensure that my design decisions were supported by user research and feedback.
Process
Persona
To start, I developed a provisional persona. This gave me an anchor point for making early design decisions and for targeting participants for usability testing and user research. 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. I asked the participants to perform 6 tasks, a few of which are listed below.
- Find a friend and give them some positive feedback for a ride or run they have done
- Of your friends, who is riding right now?
- How would you go about communicating with a friend in the app?
Synthesis And Results
I then gathered each users’ pain points and identified the biggest trends, which can be seen below.
My biggest finding was that almost all users searched for a way to send messages. I was also surprised to see most users search for a way to see who was riding right now, which is only a feature in the premium version.
Since users already have the ability to communicate after activities by commenting on posts, I assumed that users are interested in connecting with each other prior to activities ie. organizing group exercise with each other. This assumption made me seek a better understanding of how athletes currently go about organizing group exercise to see if this problem was already being solved outside of Strava.
User Interviews
I decided to do additional user research on athletes that regularly run or ride with a group. I didn’t limit the research to Strava users because I wanted to better understand all runners’ and cyclists’ mental models in regards to group exercise. Below, I have listed a few of the interview questions.
- Tell me about a time that you went for a group ride or run.
- Who organized the ride or run?
- How did you go about communicating plans before hand?
Synthesis and Results
Similar to the usability testing, I captured all of interviewees’ pain points and made note of all of the trends (pictured below).
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.
I was very excited to have come up with a rough idea for a design solution that addressed so many different user pain points while positioning itself to increase the percentage of MAUs that are grouped in activities.
Design stories
Before I started wire framing, I did an exercise made famous by Laura Klein called, “Design Stories”. The exercise entails creating an “epic”, the feature idea, and then listing out every possible thing that a user can do in the feature. I used this list as a reference point during my wire framing and hi-fidelity mock ups to make sure that I was aware of all use cases.
I decided to narrow down items from the long feature list and prioritize the ones that would bring the most value to to the most users.
Wireframes
With all of the design stories in mind, I moved into wire framing.
Hi-fidelity
Next, I went into sketch to start creating hi-fidelity mock ups. During the user interviews, the design stories and the wireframing, it became clear that I should focus on designing for both the event creator as well as the event participant. Below, I have outlined the two most important user flows of the feature.
Event Join Flow
Event Join Flow
Card Sort
In the early stages of hi-fi design, 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. I asked each participant to imagine they were organizing a group ride or run and to place the cards in the order that made most sense to them as they approached this task. A few minutes in, I asked each participant to sort the cards into a few groups based of any similarities that they found, leaving it open ended to see what kind of patterns emerged.
Design Iterations
Fortunately, during the card sort, a few patterns emerged, which can be seen in V2 of the “Event Create” screen below. Many of the other 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
Event Feed Screen
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.
Take a look at my final prototype below. I tried to integrate the feature into Strava’s current user flow as much as possible.
Big thanks to all of the people who made contributions to this project. All of the feedback was pivotal in helping me make design decisions.
