Strava iOS Redesign
Scope
User Interviews & Testing, UX Design, User Validation
Role
User Researcher, UX Designer
Timeline
2.5 weeks
Client
Strava - Case Study
Strava is an exercise tracking application that allows athletes  to share their activities through social networking. As an avid runner and user, I wanted to investigate why so many people are drawn to use this service. This case study is a resulted in a redesign responding to user feedback and testing. Here is the prototype I created.

Problem

As applications expand their features and use they can quickly become overstimulating to the user resulting in cognitive overload and reduced task success. Strava at its core it is a fitness tracker and a social platform athletes with many multifaceted features which have become increasing difficult to navigate as its service has expanded.
How might allow the athletes to easier access all of the many services Strava has to offer while creating a simplistic and streamlined user flow?

Proposed Design

App Navigation Redesign

Updated 'Find a Friends' Features

Process

Research

Althete Interviews

Through a series of seven user interview of athlete who use Strava I sought to get a better understanding of the a few main questions;
Why do you use Strava over other fitness trackers?
What are the most important feature of Strava and how could they be enhanced?
How does the current experience of the application feel to use?

Ideation

Concept Sketching

After creating design requirements from the athlete interviews I then wanted to quickly iterate on design ideas before diving into the pixels. Below are a few of the sketches I created of the screens which attempt to synthesize the user feedback with the existing interface.

Site Map & Information Architecture

In response to the althete interviews I analyzed the existing site map of the applicaiton to figure out how to incorporate the design objectives that I gleaned from the users. This was used as a roadmap to reconfigure the design.

Existing Site Map

Proposed Site Map

Prototype

Existing vs. Proposed UI

After reworking the information architecture of the site and establishing a new feature design I reworked the high fidelity layout of the application to create a testable prototype for user testing.

Usability Testing

Remote live testing

In order to be understand how existing Strava athletes respond the redesign I hosted 8 remote user testing sessions. During these sessions I wanted to get user feedback on overall navigation, verify task completion success, and assess of accessibility of the features.

User Validation

Digital Survey & Findings

After the usability tests I sent out a survey using google forms to gauge their overall experience and get feedback on the changes in the proposed redesign. These were the findings:

Next Steps

  • After finishing the usability survey I would then would to integrate the design within the broader framework of the application
  • The prototype acted as a working model of the design but in order to test its use it would need to be developed with a heatmap see if the redesign is working as intended
  • It would have been good to go through another few rounds of iteration to refine the users needs and create a design that is ready for handoff to an engineer

Conclusions

  • The athletes initially liked the idea of the find a friend feature in concept but when it was tested it helped them realize that this feature would be underutilized.
  • This helped me understand that having a working prototype can save a lot of time and money in development so people to use a feature without the company investing in the infrastructure.
  • The users crave simplicity and agility in task completion. This is evident through the reduced cognitive load shown in the site map.