The problem with Strava
It’s hard not to get addicted to Strava, especially if you have a GPS watch that syncs all of your activities automatically.
It’s so satisfying to log on and see that weekly goal chart fill up — because damn you’re smashing your goals this week you champ — and it’s just as cool to see whether you’re still on track to hit your yearly goal.
And that’s not even including the potent kudos and the extra-motivating pressure of seeing other athletes on your feed smashing their goals too.
In short — Strava’s user experience is brilliant for any athlete working away on their goals.
The problem is that it’s designed only for the perfect athlete experience.
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At least 50% of runners get injured in a year. A few months ago I became a part of that statistic and had to stop my training completely. My Strava profile, formerly a source of motivation and internal satisfaction, became a source of shame and guilt-tripping.
When you write a blog about obstacle course racing, the last thing you want is for it to appear as though you’re not training regularly yourself. And yet, aside from writing a note about being injured in your brief bio, there’s no other way to ‘hiatus’ your Strava profile or progress.
Any need for external validation aside (who cares what others think about my lack of activity), it’s still a fact that I stopped using Strava when I got injured. If a large chunk of your target audience is likely to get an injury and therefore stop using your service, why not plan for this in your UX?
Now whenever I see other seemingly abandoned profiles, I wonder if they’ve truly been abandoned, or if the person just got injured and fell out of using Strava.
How Strava could help injured runners
Undoubtedly, Strava has brilliantly designed features for helping you train consistently and train smarter so you continue improving.
There’s several ways in which these features could be used to help injured runners, and more importantly, to give them a way to still use Strava during recovery.
- Side by side comparison before and after injury
Side by side comparison is one of my favourite Strava features. It gives you a quick glimpse of how you compare against any other user, for example an athlete you strive to be like:
Being injured and not running, side by side comparisons would just make me feel worse. Yet undeniably this feature could also motivate me, in a slightly different form.
Think about it: the one goal of any injured runner is to at least get back to the level they were at before their injury. In that context, a side by side comparison of my performance pre-injury and post-injury would be the best motivator. You can bet I would be logging onto Strava regularly to track my progress.
2. Training cycles
We’re all training for different events at different times. It would be awesome if users could somehow bookend different periods of their training — to see for example how they trained for a 5k vs. a half-marathon. This would also allow users to bookend periods when they were injured and not training at their usual level or at all.
That’s better than having your activity profile look like a half-rotten ear of corn:
3. Support for different goals
A healthy runner will appreciate the weekly and yearly mileage goals. An injured runner has different ambitions.
I recently interviewed OCR athlete Zoe Szczepanek who is recovering from a hip operation. Her recovery goals started off humble — just 10mins on a stationary bike one week, 15mins the next, and so on.
Even if Strava can’t support non-mileage goals, any way of self-tracking goals could help here. Even if I manually have to tick a box to get 10% progress towards my “general recovery goal”.
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That’s just a few ideas for how Strava‘s addictive features could help injured runners as well. I’m now getting back into running regularly and am happily using Strava again. I just wish I’d never had to stop using it.
