Beyond screens

How we brought Wahoo’s design DNA to Speedplay

One central tenet of our design ethos is that our products should enable users to spend their time doing the activities they love, rather than fiddling with sensors and Bluetooth and settings. As a Product Design team at a tech company in 2021, we do of course mostly design for screens. We sketch and wireframe and push pixels for phones and embedded devices like our bike computers.

We design apps, bike computers, and watches.

But we have increasingly more products that have no batteries, no Bluetooth connections, no LEDs, and certainly no screens. For instance, Wahoo acquired Speedplay and this month relaunched the pedal line.

The important question: how can we insert Wahoo’s design DNA into products like this? Simple— by remembering that any interaction (digital or not) the user has with our products is designed and can therefore be optimized.

And which interactions with pedals are most frustrating, time consuming, and confusing for users? Speedplay pedal systems are sophisticated — ingeniously engineered and durable — and require a relatively complex cleat assembly process out of the box.

The paper that used to come with a set of Speedplay pedals. It’s not clear what to read first.

With a product manager and a print designer, we focused our attention on revamping the assembly instructions by:

• finding that near-impossible balance between too much information and too little
• creating visuals that clarified rather than cluttered (taking inspiration from the reigning champs of assembly instructions, IKEA)
• using specific but not jargony language

In other words, we worked to ensure our users spend less time fiddling with screws and tools and shims and more time out riding.

The installation portion of the new Quick Start Guide. Rich imagery, concise language.

It turns out that designing for print is not all that different from designing for screens. Both require deep empathy (what is hard about this process? what do people already know about pedal parts? what tools do most own?), writing clear and concise copy, and leveraging visuals to create mental models.

In fact, designing good experiences often has very little to do with screens (even for products that have screens!). It starts with the purchase process, packaging, assembly, and continues through the ease and joy of every day use.

You can find more about our new pedal line here.

Stay tuned for more articles like this from the Wahoo Product Design team. We have a few groundbreaking products on the horizon and we can’t wait to tell you about how we designed them.