Strava

Strava builds cardio & communities through...

activity analysis...

Users measure their athletic growth by tracking activities like running, cycling, and swimming. They share these activities with communities of people doing the same thing.

Mobile frame recreations of Activity Insights (left) and Analysis (right)

Leaderboards (left) and Home (right), showing a user's friends' activities

& location based competition.

Users can post gps tracked activities to their curated social networks and see each other’s activities. The app gamifies athletic performance: users can define public ‘routes’, and compete for spots on the ‘leaderboards.’

Some users pay for more details.

Part of Strava’s monetization strategy is a premier subscription program called Summit, which provides paying users with more in-depth activity analysis and community engagement opportunities.

Strava works better for off-court activities

Unlike easy to track activities like running & cycling, which just use a person’s gps location, sports like soccer and tennis have court boundaries. Strava isn’t set up to really track these activities effectively as of yet.

How can soccer players build communities through Strava?

players interviewed

insights condensed

competitors audited

Insight 1

Groups form on the grass

6/8 interviewees said they had found groups to play with by

finding a place to play
joining pick-up games

All interviewees said they had found soccer groups through known friends, secondary and tertiary connections

Independent play

Insight 2

Organized play

Serious groups form teams.

Groups of serious players who want more consistency choose to form teams and pay premiums for access to fields and opponents.

Problem 1

Expensive fields discourage new players

Companies that offer organized play and high quality places to play are only accessible to people already affiliated with teams willing to cover the costs.

Problem 2

...and free field info & availability is not easy to find.

Independent players have to compete with organizations of all kinds, that have the resources to reserve local fields. Public field calendars are disorganized, and not maintained well. This makes finding a field and it’s availability extremely difficult for players.

Solution

Growing Strava’s active users by bringing players to fields

Connecting players to fields enables communities to form around them. Soccer player who come to use Strava can be encouraged to subscribe to Strava Summit to tap into further community & activity tracking features, to be designed.

Define

How does field info fit into Strava’s existing infrastructure?

Strava’s full app structure below, created from a November 2022 survey of the mobile application, for the most part focuses on organizing user-posted activities.

Strava Mobile Site Map based off of iOS app

‘Maps’ Isolated in Strava’s Existing Mobile Structure

Strava helps users find activities through ‘Maps’

People can search for new types of activities on the ‘Maps’ section of the app.

Maps are made up of:

Routes: Maps of previous users’ activities

Segments: Gamified sections of routes, with leaderboards to generate a competitive community

Putting fields where users would look for them

Maps

Fields

By working new fields into Strava’s method for finding routes and segments, to make integrating this new feature easier for both users & Strava. Since all routes and segments are organized by activity anyways, the workflow for adding fields remains pretty much the same as the former.

Maps + Fields

Fields page sample

Field info that players need

Sorting through my interviews from the previous section, I organized what soccer field info people are looking for into a format compatible with Strava’s routes and segments.

How intuitive is field discovery to new and existing users?

existing
users

new
users

flows supervised

With users both familiar and unfamiliar with Strava, I navigated through 3 main flows...

Finding fields through segments
Finding fields through routes
Saving a field to check later

...to discover challenges, questions, and positive feedback I could build on.

Question

Separating fields from routes & segments

25% of users were curious about why fields didn’t have its own category

Fields currently are only featured through activity filtering. In the future they can get their own space, when activity tracking* for soccer advances enough to validate the investment of time.

*Check out my research on this in my retrospective, in the output section!

Challenge

Finding fields in fewer steps

Tested flow for finding fields

75% of users successfully completed the task, but I noticed that its much easier to find segments & routes than fields

Featuring fields along with routes & segments before an activity has been specified can reduce the amount of clicks by 50%

Optimized flow for finding fields

Connecting Strava users to Soccer Fields

Prototype

Fields in Routes

Fields integrated into Routes allows users to find fields amongst paths they have previously saved, letting people quickly rediscover fields they have played at before.

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Fields in Segments

Since segments support leaderboards for user competition, there is an opportunity to develop communities through finding fields as segments.

Saving Fields

The ‘Saved’ section of Maps allows users to navigate their saved routes, segments and leaderboard rankings. In this section of Maps, fields do not fit into either segment or route categories, so a new category, Saved Fields, is created for users to navigate to.

Retrospective

I didn’t start this Strava project with a focus on soccer, but went through 2 key pivots to get there, guided by my background research. Scroll through to read about my pivots!

Initial Idea

Tracking, Analyzing & Sharing Adapted Athletic Performance

Hypothesis

Strava's goals to reach all kinds of athletes can be enhanced through understanding & representing the needs and wants of adapted athletic users in all aspects of the user experience.

Background

Additional research into wheelchair performance analysis tools necessary for athletic performance tracking revealed several promising products on the horizon. However, lack of access to information for these tools led to a need to pivot to expanding a different part of the app, with the community and athletic goals of Strava in mind.

Conclusion: Pivot Necessary

To thoroughly examine the effectiveness of a designed solution to this on Strava's platform, I would need to perform interviews, user tests, and usability testing with members of the adapted athletic community, from trainers to hardware engineers. Though attempted, I was not able to gain community input, which encouraged me to pivot.

Pivot 1

Visualizing player position on a soccer pitch during match in activity log

Hypothesis

By creating a way to visualize position on a court during an activity, users can get simultaneously get better insights out of their play, and also connect to other activity participants in a more tangible way.

Background

There is much growth in abilities to track quantitative KPIs using tools such as AI powered cameras. There is some skepticism, however, to using quantitative methods to analyze individual and team performance in soccer.

Conclusion: Pivot Necessary

Using tracking devices to visualize & assess KPIs for soccer performance is a highly specific team-based exercise that doesn't align with Strava’s activity-based community building, and falls out of the scope of this project.

Pivot 2 (selected)

Expanding community functionality of court-based activities, focusing on soccer

Hypothesis

By allowing soccer, and eventually other boundary-tied activities to have a more supported community interface, Strava can reach more users, and increase their Summit memberships.

Background

Strava currently lacks proper community tools for activities that are tied to some kind of boundary. Their method for tracking such activities is through miles, splits, and other running specific metrics. With ‘boundary-less’ activities, Strava utilizes crowd-sources segments & routes to create groups of users.

Conclusion: Selected

The app’s mission is to primarily to encourage activity through community building, which aligns with the scope of this feature development.