Unfolding the Experience

Designing Virtual Races feature on adidas Runtastic

2020, the year that COVID-19 shook the very foundations of established concepts leading to unpredictable behaviors and some new trends are still, to say the least, very hard to measure. But some were clear as water. Virtual events started becoming the new norm as most events or social gatherings throughout the world were canceled.

We, adidas Runtastic, focuses on delivering digital solutions to foster an active fit and healthier lifestyle. The context is set. The opportunity is here: Allow our users to attend running events in our product’s digital environment. How? With Virtual Races.

Virtual Races enables a runner or other athlete, casual or professional to attend a running event in a digital setup. Normally it happens within one day to emulate better the anticipation and uniqueness of a race event. It allows the participant to run anywhere in the world in their one time and pace on this timeframe. Therefore it allows many more participants to attend than a normal physical event.

But I don’t want to focus on this text too much about numbers or specific features detail in this article. Why? Because I want to focus on what I truly believe to be the most important part. I want to talk about what’s all about: people’s experiences, expressed by themselves.

Read, digest, learn

Tuesday morning and I was reviewing the feedback from our users, a very tiresome task, as we have few thousands of reviews, in writing, and some of them quite long. Then it hit me, right there. Almost as if this piece of information was telling me:

Users want to talk about the experience because they own the experience. The feature or UI is not the focus here.

Nor it shouldn’t be. When I read feedback saying the feature motivated a father to run together with his daughter or friends were getting together to run together in an amazing weekend I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking that the button was supposed to be bigger or the text provided enough guidance. All it was there, in place, seamlessly providing a way for the user to have this amazing experience and that is the purpose, and this is what matters.

The feature, the UI, the app was only the trigger to their remarkable experience.

Unfolding

An app or feature is related to a unique purpose and desired experience. Could be something bold and world-changing like reshaping public transportation or a simple daily task like ordering food. The user interface is the way to get there. It should enable and empower a person to fulfil one’s goal or a whole community. This probably doesn’t happen overnight. It unfolds, page by page, like a huge map. And like a map, the full picture it presents itself only after the last fold. It could be the most astonishing UI in the whole wide world, if it doesn’t unfold, it’s quite useless. No matter how emotional and appealing it is. And the catch is: only the user can unfold it. Reading the feedback of the race participants gave me a nice and purposeful remembrance of that.

Main takeaways

I believe this project gave us an opportunity to have a “conversation” with a thousand of our users. Even though not a normal conversation where there is an exchange flow of ideas and thoughts but still just enough to get sincere thoughts, feelings and insights. Maybe as they were excited or frustrated about attending a virtual race they were willing to share more personal or emotional information. There were basically telling us how the map should unfold for them, and the excitement that comes from it. So what are my major learnings from all this? In a nutshell, those were my main takeaways:

• Understand the whole map in the first place. Why the project is being done? What is the aim to be achieved? What experience is this product hoping to trigger?
• Create the most suitable page to enable the next unfold. How the user could do it? How to empower them to fulfill their needs.
• See and learn how people are unfolding (or not) in sincere conversation. How does the product connect with users' expectations? What could be done better? Not talking with users afterward it’s like not wanting to know how efficient the product is.