Under each person’s name on the right you see basically two things: w/kg and number of laps. I propose instead that it shows:
- w/kg (great for comparative power output)
- watts (smooth over 3 seconds or whatever seems reasonable for average network latency)
- % FTP (show n/a if they didn’t set this)
- gender (just show the circle arrow or circle cross symbols)
- distance
The gender one above is the least important to me, but it seems easy. I’m not sure if there is enough room for all of these metrics to show, and I realize that percent of FTP is heavily dependent on people knowing this value. Showing distance instead of laps makes sense because some future edition may have variable routes where laps make less sense, but distance is universal. An alternative to distance could be duration, but there has been some talk about a leader jersey for the current rider who has ridden the furthest in a session.
These stats would make it handy if you were looking to match up with others. Also if you intend to ride together you can get a sense if someone is getting cooked going over FTP. On the road we get plenty of feedback with talking, listening or other body cues but we lack all of that virtually.
Of course for the ornery racer types (myself included) these stats would enable some pretty anti social behavior to put the screws down when it hurts most. There would probably be some grousing about it, but it seems like a useful experiment to try with the user interface.