ELEMNT RIVAL

How we designed our first multisport watch

Earlier this week, we announced ELEMNT RIVAL. With it, we enter an entirely new and expansive market.

We saw how ELEMNT was embraced by cyclists who were tired of needlessly complex, confusing products and we wanted to bring that simplicity and ease of use to a wearable format — to the running and tri communities whose needs weren’t well served by our bike computers.

Designing this watch has been a fascinating, challenging, and rewarding journey over the course of many years. It has been in development since before the releases of BOLT, ROAM, KICKR CLIMB, and KICKR BIKE (just to name a few).

Here’s how our (tiny!) product design team approached it and the challenges we faced.

Goals:

• Bring the strengths of the ELEMNT family experience to runners and triathletes. ELEMNTs have excellent defaults out of the box and the more complex interactions are quickly and easily handled on the phone. We sought to continue this pattern with ELEMNT RIVAL. We hoped existing Wahooligans would find RIVAL and the companion app familiar, and new Wahooligans would be able to jump quickly into our ecosystem and focus not on wrangling confounding lists of settings, but on their performance.

Rearranging data fields

• Create a game-changing automatic handover between RIVAL and ROAM or BOLT for triathletes: We sought to create an industry-leading triathlon recording experience by harnessing the power of a complete ecosystem that allows athletes to focus on the race, not their gear.

Multisport Handover seamlessly shares race data between RIVAL watch and ELEMNT bike computers without pushing a button.

Challenges and opportunities:

• Designing an operating system for a device that is worn all day: Even for the most dedicated athletes training at very high volumes, watches are worn mainly out of workout (unlike bike computers which are generally only used before, during, and after rides). This meant designing things we’d never designed before, including watchfaces, which are both utilities and stylistic expressions for users and include out-of-work data widgets such as steps and workout calories.

Our four watchface options: Two digital, two analog.

• Designing for workout types other than cycling: Running and (especially) swimming vary significantly from cycling: everything from an athlete’s priorities and state of mind to the length of workout, type of data gathered, and units differ.
• Designing for a small display: Compared to ELEMNT bike computers, there is considerably less room on RIVAL’s display for UI elements like button labels and long lists, so the challenge is balancing the size of information versus the amount of information.

Text-based icon labels on ROAM’s notification alerts were replaced with icon-based labels.

The KICKR mode button on ROAM was replaced with a menu item.

• Designing for a round display: The challenge of a small display is compounded by the shape: we must fit rectangular UI elements into a round screen.

Fitting rectangles into a round display is challenging!

• Designing interactions around five buttons: We’re used to designing for ELEMNT bike computers, which have six buttons. RIVAL has a more complicated feature set and fewer buttons (and one button is almost entirely dedicated to the backlight!).

Two buttons on the left; three on the right.

• Designing with a very small set of fonts: To preserve storage space for workout files, we only have a few weights and sizes of each typeface. It is a limiting factor, but also leads to cohesion, and provides extra incentive to reuse layouts. We also created a robust icon font to save space.

Our entire (Latin) font set

• Designing for a 64-color display: This display allows us to add color where it contributes to the stylistic expression for users and gives us another lever to pull (in addition to scale and weight) to create effective visual hierarchy, but adding color naturally decreases contrast compared to purely black and white UI. Contrast is hugely important, especially during workouts, so color is added sparingly.

A few uses of color

The result:

• RIVAL slots neatly into our ecosystem with automatic handover to bike computers, automatic heart rate broadcasting to bike computers, and KICKR control.
• RIVAL feels familiar, yet extended, to existing ELEMNT users. They’ll find workout pages for all profiles have fantastic defaults just like ELEMNT pages, and those pages are created and managed identically to ELEMNT. Features like sensor pairing and Live Track function exactly as expected.
• Beautiful, intuitive layouts that nicely balance size of information with amount of information, focus on contrast, and use color exclusively where it adds to the experience.
• RIVAL is a smart, steady, reliable companion that allows the user to focus on their training session or race — the feature set isn’t bogged down by useless, tired interruptions.

Simply put, a watch we simply can’t wait for athletes to take on.

We welcome runners and triathletes into the Wahooligan community with open arms. I think you’ll find we’ve created something very special for you.

Stay tuned for more on how we designed RIVAL. We’re planning a deep dive into how we designed workout pages: the structure, layouts, fonts, charts and more.

We’re currently designing many new features for RIVAL and we’ll share the design process of those as well.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy this video of Wahoo founder Chip Hawkins on the inspiration behind ELEMNT RIVAL.