The Zwift companion app allows members to plan their fitness activities, track progress, and connect with others.

We set out to...

Create a new feature that would allow club owners to create and share events to increase their roster and help people stay motivated by training together.

Measure success for our business goals with community feedback and engagement metrics.

Reduce the workload of the Zwift content team.

What we released

Results

The release of the club event creation tool received incredibly positive feedback for this long-requested feature. It was a big step forward for the community that saw rapid adoption, high usage, and increased club membership. There was also a large reduction in operational costs now that these events no longer needed to be created and published by Zwift staff.

My contributions

Discovery & Definition
User flow mapping
UX design
UI design partner
Research with current members
Stakeholder and team reviews
Roll out communication support

Partners

Product Owner
Program Manager
UI Designer
iOS and Android engineers
QA Engineers
Marketing
Customer Support

Where we started

With a wide variety of events available, we decided to focus our efforts on social rides and workouts for both runners and cyclists. Deprioritizing creating races for the time being, as improvements to the racing experience were coming up on the roadmap that would need to be considered for this addition.

I began by evaluating the event examples on the Zwift website and companion app, as well as approaches that the community had realized in a number of external, non-Zwift-owned tools.

Mapping the member journeys

I defined the first path for initial design work, creating a simple mapping of the flows we would address.

One of our main design goals was to make creating and sharing an event quick, easy, and enjoyable.

Defining the end-to-end experience

I created wireframes for the end-to-end member journey of our first path using Miro to gather feedback from stakeholders and engineering quickly. Intentionally taking a story mapping approach that would translate well to research efforts and Jira epics.

Providing intuitive templates

Through our use of suggested templates, event creators were able to quickly publish an event after making just four choices. This approach made event creation approachable for Zwifters, who were happy with the defaults, while also providing custom configuration options for creators who needed more granular control.

The awesome high-fidelity Figma work at this project stage was created by a UI design partner on the team for both iOS and Android development.

Making it easy to configure event groups

One of our biggest challenges was supporting sub-group configuration to make events more fun by offering different route or distance options within a single event. Much like a club ride in the real world, folks could join an easier option or something a bit more spicy if they were feeling up to it. Ultimately making it more fun for everyone.

We accomplished this by incorporating smart defaults, sharing prior configuration choices to added groups, and enabling override capabilities.

Building excitement and awareness

To build internal excitement for the upcoming release, I presented during a company update to share what was coming for our community.

I also used the prototype to run five moderated research sessions with club owners to gather feedback. We were thrilled to hear from members how excited they were for this feature.

What we heard from the community

Comments from Zwift community influencers:

A huge development...new and simple way to organise their own events
The game changer we have been waiting for. Revolutionary!
The key: being able to create your own events and send out a link for anybody to join
Empowers the people to do awesome things with Zwift!
It just works...it worked! Well done

If you'd like to learn more about me or my work let's chat!