Improving Activity View on Strava’s Mobile App

How Adding Two Data Points to Mobile Can Create Huge Value

Jim Bumbulsky
On Strava
Published in
4 min readNov 9, 2015

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Objective

Identify value added data points that exist on Strava’s web interface that are missing from the mobile app.

Background

Strava’s mobile app offers a feature rich way to view your own activities and the activities of others. When selecting a specific activity, this is the view you are presented with.

From the activity screen, you can see the activity title, a map of the activity, the total distance, time, average pace, and calories burned. By swiping left on the map, you can view the next screen that shows elevation, pace, and heart rate graphically.

Swiping left from that screen offers heart rate zone analysis and pace analysis for premium Strava users.

Product Suggestion

While the activity view on mobile is rather feature rich, it lacks a few key data points that are necessary when understanding the true context of any activity. The first of those data points is time of day.

Many athletes complete more than one activity in a given day for different reasons. This could be an athlete saving a warm-up and a cool-down as separate activities from the main workout or from completing separate activities at different points during the day. Nevertheless, when viewing activities on the mobile app, the only time reference is to the date.

A simple solution to improving the mobile app activity interface would be to display the time and date just as it is displayed on the web interface as shown below.

Strava could also add value to users by offering the ability to view lap splits within the mobile app. In the workout shown below, I ran four 1.5 mile intervals with .5 mile rest periods. However, the only information that is available to me is mile splits which Strava automatically calculates. As a runner who never laps his watch except for during workouts, the mile splits are a nice feature on non-interval efforts. With the said, without the ability to view lap data for this workout, this mile splits are meaningless and not representative of the workout.

The information that is valuable to a user on an interval effort is the actual lap splits. This data shown below, which is easily available on the web interface, reflects the information that is actually important for an athlete to understand the activity.

If Strava would allow a user to swipe left on the mile splits shown below to see lap metrics, athletes would not have to log on to the web interface in order to see the information they need. Mile splits are nice to have, but very often different data is needed to truly understand an activity.

Conclusion

Adding time of day and the ability to view lap data on the mobile app would offer two key pieces of data that currently do not exist on the mobile app. Right now, users need to use the Strava web interface to get the information they need about lapped workouts. While the mobile interface offers most all data the web interface does, there are still small improvements that would offer huge value.

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