Yeah, I’m probably being self centered.
I no longer change my bike often and I have all the sub 6 hour route badges so the sign in screen worked for me and I was used to it.
I would like to tweak the HUD now.
Integrated graphics could only protect me for so long and I got the new screen yesterday and everything was just fine, different, but fine.
In-game HUD should also be scalable. It’s way too big,font size too big. I’m using 4K resolution and it could be half that size.
Nothing’s changed there though. If we’re not going to get a fully customisable HUD (and I can see why) then I’d like to be able to cycle through various fixed options with the H button. Of course not every combination could be accounted for but it’d be great to just toggle off the chat only, leaderboard/nearby, (leaving just the top bits), everything, and back to normal. Four distinct HUD states.
Off-topic though.
Uh Gerrie, that was what she said. I know what you were trying to do there, but she did say that was the reason she joined Zwift from RGT:
The feature is now gone and needs to come back quickly, urgently. There is no defensible logic to taking away a well used feature.
I’ve spent an untold amount of time managing user experience teams in large scale software, and have been a part of many “UI redesigns”. The one thing that has been consistent among them all is… People hate change that doesn’t specifically make their key scenarios much better, and if any of their main flows are negatively affected in any way on the devices they’ve purchased it results in a very negative reaction even if there are some benefits they can see.
So… the more variability there is in how people use your software, the more chance a full redesign is going to have people coming out of all corners to complain - even if it works better for the majority of their customers. Zwift is interesting because the breadth of form factors and scenarios that are supported. They need one experience that somehow works on a phone and a 100" TV across iOS/Android, AppleTV, PC, etc. It’s not an easy problem to build something optimized for the whole set. Some folks are primarily racers, some are primarily here to just ride, some primarily to meet up with friends, some to workout etc.
For instance we had a case where a costly feature was used by much less than 5% of the population (literally 95% of our users never even touched it - ever), but for those <5% it was a mainline case - when we changed the flow for that to help COGS, all of a sudden that 5% became a significant percentage of our app feedback (like over half of store reviews etc.). Our app reviews went down, it well overshadowed the benefits we were adding to anyone who didn’t use that feature.
All that to say, maybe Zwift does have telemetry to say “Ride With” is used in less than 5% of sessions… (I’ve never used it for instance - don’t plan on ever using it so personally I don’t care about it), but if you are someone who uses “Ride With” and a redesign makes that harder to do… Yeah, it’s going to move up to be a top issue for you, and… if the best benefit of the redesign you personally see is easy access to achievements, and the garage (which could have been buttons on the old UX before going into a ride), then you’re not gonna be happy.
Gang - wanna say again that we’ve heard your requests to bring back the “Ride with” feature.
There’s a lot of various work being done on the new home screen UI, and we’re looking at ways to reintroduce “Ride with” as quickly as possible.
What will calm users is to give people a clear indication of when this feature will reappear. Has development or Ux research of the function started happening, if not, where does it sit in the backlog and what sprint will it appear in.
“Looking at ways” doesn’t give anything meaningful to annoyed users and hence we see sarcastic terms such as “zoon” being coined in response to those kinds of statements.
No dev roadmap can be 100% because of unexpected things creeping in, but at least being able to show that something is scheduled for a particular time demonstrates the intent.
Zwift has already finished beta testing the home screen.
Maybe Zwift will be updated next week and the new home screen will be the official version.
So they will solve many problems.
Don’t let us down!
It seems strange that this was flagged right at the start and the roll out continued before this was fixed.
Cracking post Aaron and gives a valuable insight into the mindset of people resistant to change.
I use IT software as part of my work and every few years we get a new system. When training people in preparation for the me system all will say that it’s not as good as the current one.
Then it’s implemented and again the feedback will bbc that it’s horrible.
Give it a fortnight and it’s the best thing since sliced bread.
The new UI will be the same I’m sure.
I’m in the 95% gang. Nothing about the new UI is affecting my Zwift experience.
All true, but from a dev & product manager point of view, someone must have had a conversation around removing a feature that is used and not carrying the same feature set into the new system…
Simple questions have to be asked as going through the design & build;
Are we keeping all existing features?
If we are removing something, have we consulted and communicated with the users to tell them its being removed
How long will it take to re-introduce the feature should it turn out people use it and want it.
It seems, and im prepared to be wrong, that none of that was undertaken, we know there was no comms over the removal of the feature and this could have been handled much differently if there was.
In software testing terms it isn’t fix, it is a feature update (yes it was in the old UI, but it is not in this one therefore it is a feature addition).
I got the impression when the rollout started that it was going slowly to ensure that it was stable and didn’t cause users’ systems to crash. The removal of a feature that some users use was a choice made by Zwift (and I hope they now realise it was an incorrect one). However, if the slow rollout was to test robustness and stability then an uproar about that missing feature doesn’t make it “strange” that they continued with the rollout, especially if their data shows that Ride With is used by a minority of users
Much as Aaron outlined above.
We can argue until we are blue in the face about the choices Zwift makes, but at this point they are what they are, and users can continue to lobby hard to get/get back the features they want, and decide whether they are prepared to live with how Zwift goes about things (which can be infuriating sometimes) or not.
The post I was replying to said " we’re looking at ways to reintroduce “Ride with” as quickly as possible." so i’m guessing it was an oversight and one they have been working on to reintroduce.
Id hazard a guess they made a conscious decision to exclude it & are now reacting to the feedback and scrambling to reintroduce it.
More examples of not understanding how their own product is used.
yeah probably - it was probably someone looking at the Old UI and saying
“why do we have a list of who is currently zwifting?”
“I don’t know”
“Shall we remove it? it means there won’t be so much empty and wasted space at the top of the home screen”
“Yeah, good plan”
Good list, but I think there is probably a “What are the existing features?” missing right at the top… I guess this one went more like “we want to do/highlight x, y and z, and worry about the rest of the feature set later”.
It’s really slow to load on my Windows 10 PC (which is a reasonable spec) and no longer loads at all on my laptop
Can you be more specific? Does it have an SSD hard drive or the old hard disc style?
I recently changed mine from an old hard disk to an SSD and the difference is huge.
Can you give a bit more detail.
When it’s slow what are you seeing on screen?
and on the laptop where it won’t load at all what happens when you try launch zwift?
