Podium
The single space to keep up with the swift area of road cycling. Racing event calendar, teams overview, racer insights, and a customizable feed to keep up with any news related to road cycling, including events, brands, gear, and more.
2024 – Today
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Design, Research
Summary
During Spring 2023, I started road cycling, and since then it became my favorite way to stay fit, enjoy nature, and have an offset for spending too much time at my desk. Besides just riding my bike, I started following the Grand Tour and other races, as well as teams, riders, and any kind of updates of the cycling world.
As subscribing to a bunch of RSS feeds, and following events, teams, and riders across all sorts of platforms, I got overwhelmed. Therefore, after doing an in-depth research, I decided to start building my own app that delivers a single space to space to keep up with the swift area of road cycling. Down below, you get insights into my research as well as the first couple of drafts of Podium.
This is a WIP case study and project I am actively working on. I will update this page incrementally to share my progress in public. More designs and updates to follow soon.
Intro
In Spring 2023, I got into road cycling, and since then it quickly became one of my favorite hobbies, sports, and just the right compensation to get my head free from anything related to work and life. However, I not only got hooked to road cycling to staying fit, enjoying nature, and getting my head clear, I also enjoy keeping up with the professional cycling scene, watching and following the Grand Tour Races, reading news about the team and riders, as well as finding out about new gear and what companies and brand are innovating.
Soon I got faced with the struggle that all that information was scattered across different social networks, websites, blogs, YouTube channels, and other feeds. Pulling in some RSS feeds from cycling news websites was a first, easy, and streamlined step to getting a bit closer to keeping up with the cycling world. However, a lot of brands, teams, and riders are exclusively posting to X and Instagram. After the Elon Musk Twitter takeover, I stopped using and being active on the platform. Although I have an Instagram account, I try to avoid the platform for the most part, since it is such a loophole that drags you into doomscrolling. I feel at home using social networks like Mastodon, or Posts (even Bluesky sometimes delivers valuable content). Not a single rider, brand, cycling news site, or whatsoever cycling-related is active on those kind of platforms though.
I found myself in a situation in which I discovered a clear personal need: I would like to keep up with all things from the cycling scene, without wasting time checking loads of different platforms, and hunting for the needed information scattered across different places, simply by using my phone. I would like to have a single source of truth that gathers articles and news, aggregates feeds, gives me a calendar-like overview of all the cycling events happening, and provides me with a single timeline I can browse through. All of that packed in a simple and beautiful app, following modern design and experience standards.
Therefore, I started my research, I looked for a mobile app that fulfilled my need.
Research
It did not take long and I stumbled across the official iOS apps of the three Grand Tours, Giro d'Italia, Tour de France, and La Vuelta. The first impressions of those apps were not good, especially since all three were marked by bad reviews and low ratings. The apps not only feature outdated UI, but also a certainly not satisfactory user experience, as icons could not get triggered, views not opened correctly, and overall the performance just felt slow and sluggish. As if all of those mentioned points were not already reasoning enough to not use those apps, while they would indeed give me access to race dates, stages, riders, and team information, I would need to use three different apps. On one hand, that seems fine, since those races take place apart from each other. However, it would add three apps to my phone, three different interfaces, experiences, and interactions. This should not be the way to stay up to date with the races, riders, and teams. Beyond that, those apps would only give me access to information about those three Grand Tours. Throughout the year though, there are loads of races I would like to keep up with, that are not part of the Grand Tour.
Back to the drawing board.
Research
As I continued my research, I stumbled across the Eurosport app, but before I was able to get a glimpse at the app I got prompted to allow it to search for other devices via bluetooth, give it access to bluetooth in general, using an alert to inform me about an updated 'Home' page within the 'Watch' section, although I have not opened the app once, and a full-screen view with the headline "We care about your privacy" while they also told me to accept to be tracked by countless third-parties. After entering the app, I basically got what I was looking for: a single feed populated with news about sports. However within that feed, Eurosport uses multiple content formats – stories, full width post, regular posts with a leading thumbnail, followed by the category, headline, and the time the post was created, random results of football games, as well as reminders of upcoming games. Between those sections, the feed was plastered with ads, which not natively blended in within the feed but rather used again a custom layout.
All of that, makes the feed crowded, noisy, and overwhelming. Besides that, the feed was packed with news from all kinds of sports (mostly football though) which is legitimate since Eurosport is reporting on multiple sports. However, an icon within the top section of the app reminded me that I can edit the feed, but only after registering an account. So, I went ahead and did that.
Research
The experience of setting up and creating the account was simple and straightforward. After the account got created, I was already able to select my favorite sports, competitions, teams, and players to keep up with news and videos. It was quite the bummer when I realized that the suggested cycling competitions were all just the men's races. After using the search bar, I found the three women‘s Grand Tours - La Vuelta Femenina, Tour de France Femmes, and Giro d‘Italia Women - so, why not already put them up along the suggested competitions? Since it seems like there are more competitions in Eurosports‘ database, why not populate the view with all of them, and offer filters to trim down the results? Sounds of Philipp taking notes ...
I had hope that after that customization process, I would get a nice feed only populated with cycling news. Sadly, the reality was different. I try my best to explain the experience Eurosport went for. After selecting Cycling as my favorite sport, and favoring some races, as well as a team, and a rider, those favorites got added in the top bar that looked weirdly empty in the beginning, and unfortunately, the way Eurosport decided to display those favorite elements, it looks even weirder. There is an imbalance between the elements, the logos are tiny (almost not recognizable), some races do not feature a logo at all, and other do have one but it is white on an almost white background. So, what I got from what I thought would be a customization process, are some plain shortcuts. Tapping on them, do not populate the home feed with only information and news about cycling, a specific race, or team, suddenly I get taken to a new view, with another top tab control, another isolated feed plastered with ads. The interaction and experience of switching between my favorites could not feel any more disruptive as there are a lot of taps involved.
Overall, the Eurosport iOS app felt a bit overwhelming, unintuitive, bloated, and it definitely did not meet my needs when it comes to modern design standards.
Putting on my research hat again.
Research
The next app I stumbled across was Tour Tracker. First things first: Tour Tracker is the first iOS app I have seen during all those years of using an iPhone, that has eight, let me repeat that, eight tabs in its tab bar. Besides that using plain white for all the icons within the table view cells, the tab bar, and the navigation bar, combined with plain white text and labels, on a pitch black background puts everything on the same visual level, resulting in the list of hierarchies, relevance, and overall simply creating a bland interface. In contrary to that, I assume that this kind of interface works for a lot of people, it simply does not work for me. Using beautiful designed apps, that feature a top-notch experience, lovely details, and motion is something special, and it brings me joy.
However, I deeply appreciate the depth of information provided by Tour Tracker. They offer a great race calendar, provided information about courses, results, riders and team rosters, as well as cycling news. It seems like most of the articles in the News tab are getting pulled in from Cycling Weekly. Pretty cool. I would love to have the possibility to select sources for the News tab on my own, so I can add even more sources in the first place, but also to customize my experience. Speaking of customization, this is what I deeply missed in Tour Tracker. While it ticks a lot of boxes, there is no single feed which I can customize and tailor to my needs. The biggest pain point though is without a doubt the design and visual design language of the whole app. Unfortunately, it does not feel like an app I am looking forward to open every single day to keep up with the world of cycling.
Research
According to App Store ratings and reviews, it seems like the most popular app to keep track of cycling events is Cyclingoo. While the design is surely more modern compared to Tour Tracker, it is still far off, of what I would call modern design standards. In general, by that I mean following operating system specific design patterns. On iOS, use a tab bar to quickly navigate between separated views, a navigation bar that contains the controls for navigating through the app, table views to display either small or large amounts of list style information, segmented controls for filtering content or creating tabs for categorized content types, and so on. To me, as a designer, those are the things that matter. And I like when those components get customized, not every app should look like an app designed by Apple.
Cyclingoo does not really follow iOS design patterns. Everything feels a bit over the place. And upon opening it, you get greeted by an ad banner in the exact spot where the tab bar should be. I am quite negative towards the display of such banner ads. First of all, they could not be more random, useless, and disruptive (especially when they occupy the same of a operating system specific navigation element). In addition to that, the decision to place those ads in an app, agreeing to the fact that it will pretty much ruin the aesthetics of the app, feels weird to me. I am not against monetization, but there are better ways to approach this, and yeah I know that a lot of people feel subscription fatigue (me included), however, if an app provides a value to me, I am more than happy to pay for it. There is even the option to include a tip jar for quick and easy donations. Providing a subscription to only remove ads (like Cyclingoo) encourages your users to pay to just remove ads, instead of encouraging them to invest in your app and because they enjoy using your app. A subscription that makes an app ad-free is just an indicator that ads are annoying.
After an in-depth research, I found out a lot about cycling apps, however, I did not find the right app for my needs. Therefore, I decided to give it a try, and design the cycling app that fits all my needs, provides me with a customized feed in which I can keep up with cycling news, events, races, teams, and riders.
Let me introduce to you, Podium.
What's next
The design of Podium is currently a work-in-progress. I am laying out all the different screens and views needed, and update this page incrementally. In the long run, I would love to actually build this app. My knowledge is too limited to make that happen, however, with the rise of leveraging LLMs as development-partners, there is an interesting opportunity lying in that.
I will keep you posted