Lead the UX design for an update mobile feed to allow athletes tell their stories and allow more social engagement by exposing activities from other athletes. The goal is to increase engagement through storytelling to facilitate social interaction between athletes.
Some of the challenges include Rich & visual content, Future proof for new content, Balance for rich & generic entries. Knowing which activities are worth diving deeper into or giving kudos.
Design
Role: UX Lead and PM
This project focused on the iteration on a very core part of the mobile app that started off as personal tracker with a simple feed of running and cycling activities. The mobile app is a great companion to stay in touch with others and allow social snacking on the go so we started with an extended period of research to understand how users are using our product in a social context and which existing engagement mechanisms are already successful.
I met with cyclists and runners to learn about the types of content they post, how they interact with others, and what would allow them to engage even more with our apps. The goal was to learn from them how they consume strava content, specifically activities and what do they look for when going through other athlete’s activities. I wanted to understand how do they determine what’s interesting to them and what types of storytelling they wanted to see for their own activities.
I also conducted a comparative analysis to summarize existing UI patterns and user behavior in other social networks. The goal was to take advantage of lessons learned on interactions and best practices for shared chronological content. One of the problems that we’re trying to solve for our users is giving them the right amount of information at a glance. The interface needs to answer the user’s question if they should dive in and look at someone’s activities in more detail and do they deserve a kudo or comment.
Challenges for this project included the wide variety of content that can be seen in an athlete’s feed of activities. A social feed needs to support various sports and their unique representations as well as content from different locations all over the world. When consuming Strava’s feed users encounter a wide range of activities from inspirational all-day rides to complex workouts that tend to look less engaging at first look.
Furthermore a content channel like the feed has a lot of stakeholders within the company, so we need to create a robust and modular solution to allow future extension and scale beyond just run and ride activities.
With the research we focused on the most impactful changes to drive engagement with our mobile apps. wireframed concepts and worked close with visual design to get early prototypes in front of users paper and invision prototypes. We tested various combinations of map and photo layouts and new concepts like group rides that collapses similar activities into one. In addition I came up with the idea of treating “simple” activities like collapsed content with the goal to reduce clutter from activities such as commutes.
