I voted on this one a long time ago, but for me personally Zwift putting a strong emphasis on making improvements that help lend predictability to what’s coming up in terms of gradient would be a huge improvement. The current course gradient UX is lacking in so many ways. It doesn’t give a good overview of the specific route you are on (it’s even sometimes hard to tell which direction you’re going on the gradient even if it did represent the actual course you were riding), it doesn’t do a good job of showing you what is coming up (particularly in cases where the mini-gradient gets pushed off the screen which I know is a known bug), and it’s really hard to tell the gradient coming up in the actual main game UX - much more difficult than in real-life, making it much more important to show it visually in other ways.
Personally I would rather them focus on greatly improving this aspect of the game rather than overhaul the main menu/entry UX as they are doing with this next major release because the menu-UX overhaul won’t actually help the main gameplay once you’re pedaling, while having much better gradient predictability in-game would change how I pace the ride I’m on many times during every single ride that has significant elevation gain changes.
Maybe this should follow the natural reading direction for the language selected.
I dare say people would have individual preferences. It’s funny, because when I’m watching footy on the telly, I always prefer it when my team are playing from right to left.
Totally agree that the gradient map should be much more prominent and/or easier to read. Does nobody at Zwift HQ cycle? Gradient is everything. Astonishing how Zwift just don’t care at all about UX or paying customer’s requests. This has been 3 years and not a peep.
I submitted a bug ticket for activities on the website constantly reverting to displaying Imperial instead of Metric as selected. Many others have complained. They said, “we’ll look into it”. Also still broken years later.
I’m trying a FulGaz right now and seriously considering ditching Zwift for this.
I can’t believe that this still hasn’t been fixed. I have the exact problem you just described. Tried a new course yesterday and it had a hill right out of the start that was almost 10 minutes long. I went into it expecting a 1 minute climb and almost died trying to hang on. It seems like it would be so easy for Zwift to fix this; every other app or bike computer I’ve used has been doing this with no problems for 5 years.
Right?! This has to be the single most important factor to a cyclist, and the whole point of Zwift (in theory) is to provide a real-world experience. Yet the most important real-world cycling factor – whether you are going up or downhill – is almost impossible to anticipate in-game. It blows my mind that Zwift hasn’t fixed it.
I use an iPhone. This has a neat feature where you can define a section of the screen to magnify by a defined amount. You see where this is going …
In iOS got to Settings, Accessibility, Zoom.
Turn on Zoom and change “Zoom region” to Window Zoom”.
Now start Zwift and go into a ride. Double tap three fingers on the screen and the zoom windo will pop up.
By clicking on the thicker part at the bottom, you get to move it around, resize, change zoom level, etc.
I resize the window and put it over the elevation and gradient graph so it show up and is actually readable. Once you’ve got it in the right spot and at the right zoom level, it’s much better!
It may be much better but still not good. No way you’ll be able to tell, say, the gradient 100 m up the road from the current graph, however much you magnify it.
The whole app is a WIP. It follows a simple rule, never change a running system. Eventhough its still in a BETA phase (feature) requests are hardly realised over the last 5 years… it works for the masses but if your ambitious you will quickly encounter hardcoded limitations.
Well. I got directed to this ancient thread from another ancient thread. As a new user starting this form of training it seems obvious that looking for another app is the only way to go?
The whole purpose of our smart trainers is to simulate varying pedaling resistance. And the major factor for that changing is slope (or naturally wind that would be too hard to explain in a “game” accept drafting). Start a route in Zwift and turn off the monitor. What is the ONLY thing that happens in your fake cycling world? Changing resistance while pedaling… No braking, turning, watching out for other cyclists, cars or cracks in the road.
So the main focus for increased immersion and satisfaction is to help us understand WHY it changed. And what to expect in the future to plan ahead. Should I continue to push 500 Watts as the end of the nasty hill is so close or change gears and accept that I will get drained too much pushing on… The way to solve it? Better UI representation of the gradient profile…
Ok, when i started to post about this, I was very new to Zwift - and on a trial account. Now I have quite some miles with it. And generally I like Zwift a lot. But now I m a paying customer… I do not have any financial problems, but to pay 180 Euros a year for a service where the product management ignores something like this really contradicts what I have been working with my whole career as a software professional.
I started as a successful fullstack developer but ended up as a CIO. Why? Because I understand the things that are important to focus on, not just coding them. So I can with confidence say that this is in the lower right corner of the CYNEFIN model. And makes a lot of sense for almost every customer. A low hanging fruit. So just do it
My 20 year old son who is studying engineering tried my Tacx with Zwift yesterday. He fits the social age target group that Zwift seems to focus on perfectly. He not only wins math / coding contests, but also loves design and can discuss UI/UX, colors and fonts for hours. So without me saying anything about what I do not like about Zwift, he said after 10 minutes of riding: “Can you please change that awful height profile in the lower part of the mini map dad? It’s almost impossible too see”, “No - that’s the only look…”, “No - that’s impossible!”. He actually started laughing…
I and many other racers have started to use the ZwiftPower Live gradient graph when racing.
It works great. I have it on a second TV below the main Zwift TV, but it should of course be integrated into the game as others have suggested above.
You can see the whole event route - easy to get an overview
Segments/KOMs (some but not all?)
The only thing that could have been improved, is the 30-sec update frequency. It should have been updated every 10 sec or better. A lot can happen in 30 sec in a race.
It would also be nice if the graph could be automatically zoomed in when a timed climb/KOM starts.
Thanks - that looks exactly like what should have been in Zwift years ago Maybe all along the bottom part of the UI? If you want it as an option? I would buy it if it was something complex - in this case I simply cannot understand why they keep the extremely rudimentary and “easter egg” like confusing UI representation of the height profile. At least separate it from the map…
It’s like a task from university. You have a collection of key value pairs with distance (from start) and elevation. Visualize that in a graph. Bonus points for highlighting elevation steepness in color. Note that this needs to be done before lunch…
I think I’d want it to rescale the Y axis elevation to fully utilize the fixed window height, based on the course. eg. redraw this example so that Y axis is labelled 25, 50, 75, 100m
Maybe all along the bottom part of the UI? If you want it as an option? I would buy it if it was something complex - in this case I simply cannot understand why they keep the extremely rudimentary and “easter egg” like confusing UI representation of the height profile. At least separate it from the map…