After I qualified for the Boston Marathon, I got very serious about marathon training and became a power user of Strava.
The more I used Strava, the more I identified underused features that if improved could make an already excellent platform into something truly special.
As someone who builds and designs digital products for a living, I was compelled to investigate. What started out as a small side-project very quickly became an all out obsession.
I wanted to understand why people weren’t using Strava to communicate with each other and their clubs. I wanted to better understand why inefficient email chains and Facebook groups were still the main communication channels.
After a few weeks of digging, I uncovered that endurance athletes use very fragmented channels to communicate with their coaches, clubs, and their peers. It became clear to me that the solution to these Ghost Towns wasn’t as simple as my initial assumption of — “ just build private messaging”.
To escape some of my assumptions, I did what all product people worth their salt would do — research. I started by interviewing five Strava clubs and over 30 of their athletes. My objective was to understand why their passion for Strava does not translate in using it to communicate. Concurrently, I started to monitor each club’s behaviour across various communication channels.
The first crucial part was to understand some of the W’s behind the communication that was occurring in these clubs— who was it between, when [in the week + training cycle] it was used, what channel was used to get the job done and of course why they were communicating in the first place.
I identified nine areas of communication and started to see very strong patterns. Strava is underused in eight of the nine areas, and leads in encouragement/cheering communication by a very slight margin.
There was a wide range of communication topics in these groups, but the main three were: Sharing workout/route details, sharing pictures, and sharing member results.
Using my run club research as a starting point I turned my attention to their athletes. We arrived at many of the same conclusions but they provided me with crucial insights around why they used one channel over another.
Clubs tend to follow the behaviour of the group leader, and often that doesn’t include Strava in the communication flow. Email chains and Slack groups were used for clubs under 30 people, but the larger casual clubs tended to favour Facebook Groups. Other than uploading personal activity to Strava people were unsure of what they were supposed to do after they joined a Strava club. Fascinatingly enough, several athletes mentioned that they were actually nervous to post on Strava.
“No one seems to post in it regularly [Strava Club] and I don’t want my question left there for everyone to see for months. Questions I post in our FB group blend in with all of the other content being shared.”
Based on my newly found understanding of the customer journey, it became apparent that Strava needs to work towards strengthening their platform when it comes to three areas:
- Increase the breadth + type of posts in clubs
- Athlete to athlete communication
- Coach to athlete communication
With my research, I decided I could make the biggest contribution to increasing the breadth and type of posts that occur in clubs.
With this focus, I went into brainstorm mode. I started to generate a long list of possible solutions for the problem, while also considering how to increase the most popular communication areas used by endurance athletes. I narrowed down the list to three solutions.
1. Claim Group Activity
Strava has put in enormous effort towards creating events and identifying group activity from solo activities. Letting clubs claim group activity would allow them to benefit from the effort that they put into organizing these events.
Today group specific events are lost within a club’s activity feed. New and potential members have no way to see group run history nor are they able to see the intensity of the runs.
Making it easy for a club to claim a group activity would help to regularly generate valuable content without increasing the effort from an admin.
2. Sync Activity Photos
Aside from sharing routes or announcing events, sharing images from a group run were the most popular posts on Adidas Runners and Nike+ Facebook groups.
Whenever a group run occurs, automatically gathering images from participating members would provide a seamless experience. Giving members the option to manually upload their own images would increase the amount of fresh content within the platform.
Powerful value adds could be as small as allowing users to use a club activity photo for their own personal activity feed.
3. Member Highlight
One question that helped guide the brainstorm was:
How might we increase the number of posts without increasing the work for an admin?
Looking at other social platforms, I realized that automating or making it easy to post high quality content helped prevent stale feeds. An area on Strava Clubs where this is applicable is highlighting member achievements. Clubs could have the ability to define what is an achievement so there is some level of personalization for every club— club anniversaries, club records, attendance streaks, winning races or achieving new PBs or goals.
Making it easy for admins or members to share highlights will increase the amount of valuable content being posted within Strava Clubs.
When I first started to look into communication on Strava, I predicted that all of my solutions would be around private messaging. Instead my research lead me in a completely different direction — with a focus on automation and preventing stale feeds.
The solutions above are rough concepts but I’d love to hear your thoughts and hear about how you would go about increasing communication on Strava.
