Muting, a new feature concept by Strava
A Strava (striver?) product manager was sitting around at home, checking the metrics and noticed a worrying trend. A small, but growing fraction of users were setting their activities to private.
This is bad.
When you set a strava activity to private you hide it from all other users.
Your friends can’t leave comments and it doesn’t show up anywhere else either, not on clubs, public challenges or segment leaderboards – the fiercely fought over strips of road that make Strava unique, and extra sticky.
The less they show up, the less value they give and receive from the platform. Less time using the product means less money.
After speaking to users, the product manager starts to understand what’s happening.
Certain activities don’t belong in the feed. Users felt like they were ‘cluttering’ or ‘spamming’ the feed with a quick warmup, a grocery store walk or a short commute.
A problem is defined: “As a user, I want to track an activity (and still compete for challenges, leaderboards etc) but don’t want to clutter the feed with it.
A team is assembled, and they look to the designer for an elegant solution.
Concepts, not features
Concepts are an important way to think of the glue holding together well designed software.
Daniel Jackson thinks this is one of the main things good designers should be thinking about.
Hashtags are a concept. Tweets are a concept. Hosting a space is a concept.
Without concepts, we would have trouble using and understanding software like twitter, quickbooks, uber and the macOS finder.
Every concept needs to have a purpose (why it exists) and an operational principle (how it works).
Here’s an example.
Concept: Trash
Purpose: Allow undo of deletions
Operational principle: If you delete a file, it moves to a special folder; you can restore from there, but emptying it removes contents for good (and makes space on disk).
Mute it!
At the whiteboard, the designer pitches better privacy controls. “Maybe you could set an activity to private, but still show up on leaderboards?” It starts to get confusing. Current privacy controls are ‘only you, followers or everyone.’ Are we proposing a fourth option that is ‘not on newsfeed’? The concept of privacy starts get overloaded. It’s trying to do too many things, and becomes harder to learn, use and understand.
How about silent activities? Just like you set your ringer to silent, or turn on ‘do not disturb mode’ when you sit down at the cinema, Strava could ‘silence’ an activity. Or…
Concept: Mute an activity
Purpose Don’t publish on Home or Club feeds
Operational principle: If you mute an activity, you prevent it from appearing on your followers feeds. It will still be public; viewable on your profile and will still count toward leaderboards.
If muting works as intended, Strava should see less private activities, since we assume that a % of private activities shouldn’t really be ‘private’ anyway. They might also see more recorded activities in general, because now users can happily record their trip to the shops, without anxiety about polluting the feed.
Check out the press release, and see what you think.
“She was a different person altogether. Now, for instance, instead of sipping a thimbleful of port and complaining of the headache, she tossed off a tumbler of Chianti and slept the sounder. There was a flowering branch of oranges on the dinner-table instead of one denuded, sour, yellow fruit. Then instead of driving in a barouche landau to Regent’s Park she pulled on her thick boots and scrambled over rocks. Instead of sitting in a carriage and rumbling along Oxford Street, they rattled off in a ramshackle fly to the borders of a lake and looked at mountains; and when she was tired she did not hail another cab; she sat on a stone and watched the lizards. She delighted in the sun; she delighted in the cold. She threw pine logs from the Duke’s forest on to the fire if it froze.”
Two very simple lessons
“It doesn’t matter how much power you’ve got. If you’re going slow, you’re gonna go slow. The most important thing is to go fast. At Kona I didn’t even have a power meter.” - Source
“How important to a video’s success is the title and thumbnail? Very important. If they don’t click on the video, they don’t watch it.” - Source
Cooking
Cardio is a cooking of the body. To start with, skin and bone and legs and arms are wrapped in fabric. Dipped, splashed and seasoned with chlorine. Or cold air. Brushed with grass, scratched with twigs. Left to bake a bit in the sun. But the harder it gets, the body cooks. Heats up. Turns over and over and over.
At the ‘limit’, a word that every person recalls in a slightly different way, each discipline will eventually finish you off.
Running is heat. You immolate. Lungs, legs are burning in an especially violent manner. That’s what makes you grin at the end, you are grinning through flames.
Cycling is a grinding, mechanical death. You pop and explode but it’s your machine blowing up with you. Wheels and spokes root into the ground and grind to a halt. You stare at yourself like you are observing a death from a helicopter. Oh, yep, he’s done.
Swimming. What is it with swimming? Sight and sound are dulled by water. The lungs hurt but they are safer surrounded by water. Your soul leaves your body. Peacefully. Water always wants you to stop, it’s been trying for the last hour. You are only ever a couple of kicks away from stopping. And when you raise yourself out of the pool the water goes still.
Is Triathlon Antifragile?
“How can you think yourself a great man, when the first accident that comes along can wipe you out completely.” - Euripides
“Specialization is for insects.” - Robert A Heinlein
Nassim Taleb defines the term antifragile as anything that is the opposite of fragile. And unlike resilience which resists shocks and stays the same, the antifragile gets better.
Well, what about Triathlon?
Let’s look at the origins the discipline. The earliest record for a triathlon-like event was in 1901, named “Les Trois sports”. It was advertised for ‘sportsmen’ and consisted of a run, bicycle and canoe. Eventually, the canoe was replaced with a swim across a river.
Nowdays, the triathlon that we recognize today emerged in the mid 70’s, by Americans who had apparently never heard of the French origin story and is much more standardized. The ITU accepts no more than a 5% margin of error in the cycle and run course distances.
A competition that’s only been around for 40 years, with very exact distances and rules, sounds fragile to me. Doing ‘trois sports’ in a haphazard and dangerous way. Now that’s antifragile.
Let’s take a look at the individual legs.
Running
Vibram fivefingers - fragile
Old runners - antifragile
Stretching - fragile
Taking it easy - antifragile
HR zones - fragile
Hill sprints - antifragile
Treadmill & tv - fragile
Long walks to recover - anti fragile
Camelpak bladder filled with gatorade mix - fragile
Stop at cafe for glass of water - antifragile
Bucket list marathon - fragile
Trail run after work - antifragile
Swimming
Drills - fragile
A mile a day - anti fragile
Roka Propel 2 Wetsuit - fragile
Speedos - antifragile
Pool - fragile
Ocean - antifragile
Cycling
Aero - fragile
Power - antifragile
Only use trainer unless racing - fragile
Riding in the rain - antifragile
Tubeless - fragile
Patching inner tube for 1000th time - antifragile
FTP - fragile
Riding without a Garmin - antifragile
General Classification - fragile
Le Prix de la combativité - antifragile
Gravel bike - fragile
Riding on whatever surface you feel like - antifragile
Kristian Blummenfelt obsessing over his lactate numbers in a Sierra Nevada compound is inspirational, but fragile, and not a good model for an everyday athlete.
If you take things a little less seriously, look at the data a bit less and stop worrying about the latest gear and gadgets, you’ll more likely to last longer in the arena.