Today was near the end of my trial. It wasn’t obvious when I launched Zwift today, and there was no indication of any potential issues when I started one of the 110 minute workouts (1st workout of century ride training). (problem 1)
50 minutes into the ride, a giant popup came up telling me my time had expired, I clicked the button to sign up, which sent me to the website… Ugh, middle of my stupid workout. (problem 2)
I alt-tabbed (PC version) back to the app and nothing had changed… so I used my phone (fortunately had that up as well) and paused my session. There was no obvious way to pause it via PC. (problem 3)
Okay, fine, I didn’t have my wallet or CC handy, run around and get that, enter my info, that goes okay, except a warning something about maybe the charge not being credited to account right away, but no worries, it’d let me keep riding anyway… Okay…
I alt-tab back to the game, and hit some random key (ESC? mouse button? I don’t know.) (problem 4, interface isn’t obvious a lot of the time). Giant popup goes away. That seems like a good sign…
I ride for a little bit longer, and there’s a warning on bottom of screen about only 10km left in trial. Why is that? I thought this was all time based, and I had clearly just subscribed… (problem 5)
I hoped that when I got to the end of the 10k, it might re-poll the servers, check my subscription status and let me continue my workout… But no, end of 10k, the same giant popup, I click signup hoping maybe it would re-poll, but no. I couldn’t get the popup to clear a second time, and was forced to save my workout half way through…
Extremely unsatisfying…
I won’t go into my other issues, all of them relate to polish, and maybe I’ll post about them at a future time. But they are relevant to mention, that although I enjoy the experience of riding, I like the availability of training workouts (and custom workouts), the lack of polish I saw earlier is also reflected in the signup. It made me immediately regret my purchase decision…
It should be pretty obvious what could be done to improve the signup experience at all points I ran in to problems. There may be even more non-obvious solutions.
- Tim