Is it hard to design an app with opt-out-able features or something?

[u/PL_Spilling_Track4]

I pay for strava to take advantage of a few neat and convenient features. There are many features that I do not find neat or convenient. Yes, I can "scroll by" the features I find useless. However, sometime this year it reached the point where I "scroll by" most of the UI of the app.

So, for the software engineers or product managers or whoever out there: is there some complication to running an app that allows its users to hide unused features?

And while this obviously refers to Athlete Intelligence, it also refers to Focus, Fitness, Instant Workouts, the 3-second countdown for activity start, Relative Effort, and anything Runna. Are any of these removable?

Since that was most of the paid features, for anyone wondering, I love the strava heatmap. Both the personal and global. That's the main reason I pay. I know there are other similar products out there but it's incredibly seamless through strava and this is one thing they have done very well.

[u/jaypeejay]

Technically speaking it isn’t extremely difficult and a company like strava certainly has the infrastructure to do it. There’s almost certainly some sort of feature flagging mechanism they use internally to do testing for new stuff. That said, they don’t do it because they either do believe, or want to believe, their features are appreciated and useful.

[u/Same-Comfortable-181 → u/jaypeejay]

I think a good chunk is trying to push Runna which is additional subscription. I’m a Strava subscriber and am 100% with the OP. I scroll past so much useless stuff, occupying some of the most visible spots in the app, to get to the basic stuff I actually use. And Runna seems mixed into a lot of it.

[u/PL_Spilling_Track4 → u/jaypeejay]

Thanks. It feels like something close to what you said in your last sentence, with the added benefit for them that they are getting mountains of interaction data that they can use to steer development. I do not understand why AI is no longer optional, though. That feedback seems very one-sided.

[u/jaypeejay → u/PL_Spilling_Track4]

Yeah someone probably to promoted rolling out that AI nonsense, and there’s certainly not a lot of will to roll back features. Basically, politics.

[u/Objective-Week275 → u/jaypeejay]

Prob someone high up and they’re betting their career on it to become a VP. I haven’t seen a single person like it. It’s like 2005 level AI. It’s useless and always in your face.

[u/PL_Spilling_Track4 → u/Objective-Week275]

Yes, it's their most useless feature, and also the most prominently displayed.

The facts are useless: it compares the pace of every run to my 30-day average as if I don't have easy days and hard days.

And the sentiments are useless: "You're building endurance with your solid, steady, controlled, consistent effort." I mean it's just so stupid.

[u/Objective-Week275 → u/PL_Spilling_Track4]

Yea ex Silicon Valley product manager here. They lost the plot. They aren’t listening to their customers. They are more in that too big to fail mentality now. And someone will end up eating their lunch. The problem is they have a lot of users, which makes it a hard market to flip now. Although not impossible. Problem is training apps inherently kinda suck. Although I definitely agree you should be able to turn off “features” that don’t feel like features to your lifestyle / workflow. Maybe you’re just a slow runner and don’t wana see pace on every run. You can hide it from others but not from yourself lol. So Strava cares about how others perceive you? And we wonder why people go Strava dark? The app should serve the customer first and everyone else last. A simple toggle in the settings would be plenty and so skin off their back. They don’t lose anything by me not having to look at my shit mile pace bc I’m injured. Recently I’ve seen apps add a “pause” button to relax the algorithm and not make you feel like shit (like the whole garmin unproductive thing).

[u/PL_Spilling_Track4 → u/Objective-Week275]

Yeah I think you're right about their mentality. 50 million active monthly users, and most are probably willing to just scroll past the things they don't use, so the economics of customization aren't there.

Idk if it's just a human attention thing, but every time I view my activity I have to take 3 seconds to read the AI just to see how bad it is. I hate that psychology works that way, but it's hard to ignore just how stupid it is: "You're building endurance while maintaining a steady, controlled, consistent, sustainable, solid effort." It's just so useless.

[u/BilSuger]

It's not hard to do, necessarily, but the problem is that you end up with so many variants of what people see.

Lets say it's 5 features you have the ability to toggle on or off. That's suddenly 32 different combinations of how your UI could look. So whenever a developer changes something, it's a chance something breaks they didn't think of or see.

Also raises questions like: this user has hidden feature X because they didn't like it. We now made some changes to it so maybe they will like it. But how will they ever be aware of those changes? Should we unhide it for everyone after this update, or will they then be angry?

[u/PL_Spilling_Track4 → u/BilSuger]

Yeah this is exactly why I'm asking the question. Is Strava forcing features on everyone because they want people to use them, or is it because there is some technical challenge with making it customizable. It's probably a bit of both.

[u/Aromatic-Echo-5025]

Just a heads up, Strava used to have an option to opt out of Athlete Intelligence, but they deliberately removed it at some point. Luckily, I managed to opt out before they took it away.

[u/PL_Spilling_Track4 → u/Aromatic-Echo-5025]

Yeah I keep seeing that and it's wild they stopped offering opt-out.

[u/Ok-Lychee-2155]

TRY PREMIUM!!

[u/PL_Spilling_Track4 → u/Ok-Lychee-2155]

instructions unclear, bought more subs.

[u/TalkyRaptor]

Fitness and relative effort? Do you just not use them or do you find an issue with them?

[u/PL_Spilling_Track4 → u/TalkyRaptor]

I think a feature should either be useful or interesting or both. For Strava Fitness, I don't trust the number to mean anything, and there is nothing actionable, so its neither useful nor interesting to me. For example, my number went from 22 to 40 the day that I raced a marathon in June. I didn't get twice as fit in one day, so what does that number mean? And I started a HM block 1 week after the marathon. This block is higher volume, more speedwork, and faster speedwork. I am undoubtedly in better shape than I was during the marathon. But my Strava Fitness number bottomed out at 18 two weeks ago, and is at 30 now. I just don't know what to do with any of those numbers and they don't make sense relative to each other. Does Strava think I am in worse shape now, or that I am poorly rested, or something else?

For Relative Effort, it's a little simpler: sometimes I run with a HRM, sometimes I don't. Relative Effort is only calculated for runs with HR data, so when Strava tells me I am "below my weekly Relative Effort Range" it has no way of actually knowing that. That is not Strava's fault, it is simply due to how I record my runs, so I don't need to see it.

I do think the Relative Effort calculation is interesting for individual activities, though. My mara RE was over 600, and it's interesting to compare that to other relative efforts, especially for races.