As someone who has led (literally) hundreds of Zwift rides over the years, I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. In fact, we’ve published some posts to help ride leaders do an amazing job:
How to Lead A Zwift Group Ride – Friday Pacific Sprintapalooza
Behind the Scenes of a Group Ride
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how Zwift could improve the experience for ride leaders and, by extension, improve the overall “product” these leaders create. Here are my top 7 ideas…
#1: More Event Customization Options
Today, event organizers are quite limited in what they can directly modify when setting up their events. You can’t change the title or description text, for example. You can’t create an actual race that uses Zwift Racing Score and/or shows up on ZwiftPower. You can’t modify your event banner, the mix of powerups, place riders on a particular bike or wheelset or in a particular kit… and the list goes on.
Yes, you can email Zwift’s events team or submit a change request to get these changes done. But that just introduces delays into the process, thus reducing creativity on the platform.
I get it: Zwift doesn’t want to let just anyone upload their own event banner or change their event title to something naughty. But certainly Zwift could build a process to handle this safely and efficiently.
#2: Improved Route Picker/Customizer
Zwift does let event organizers choose from a long list of routes, and set their event length based on total distance, total time, or number of laps.
The route-picking tools could be improved, though. For example, they don’t tell me how much climbing you’ll be doing if you set up a 100km ride on Waisted 8 like I did last week for the Thursday Pizza Burner.
They also don’t show where the finish line will be if you set a custom distance on any particular route, which is what I do for almost every Tiny Race. Right now, I have to test-ride routes in order to figure out what event distance to key in so the finish banner is located at the right place.
One last little niggle when it comes to precise event lengths – and I know I’m getting into the weeds here. If I input a 2 or 3-digit distance, which I often do for Tiny Races, that distance gets saved into the system, but the system rounds it to 1 decimal place if I go back to edit the race. Annoying. Round it on the frontend, that’s fine. But please don’t confuse me further when editing!
#3: Beacons Always In Rider List
The longer a ride is, and the more hilly the route, the more chance there is that the group will get spread out. Anything Zwift can do to help riders find a group would be welcome.
It would be really nice if the rider list always showed the location of the yellow and red beacons. Show the time gaps to these riders, too. This would let participants see if they should work to re-catch the beacon or ease up and rejoin a beacon group, giving everyone much better visibility of the location of key groups in the ride.
#4: Chat Visibility Improvements
First, I’d love to see fewer blank messages on Zwift (see image above). As far as I can tell, these happen when people send emojis via the Companion app, or message in a non-English character set (Japanese was used above). It seems like adding emojis would be an easy win for Zwift. As for other languages – certainly we could show non-English characters? Or (this would be amazing) – auto-translate messages into each rider’s native language. How cool would that be?
Next, let’s talk about who sees which messages in group rides. Rider leaders have it pretty good: they get to see all riders’ messages, and everyone in the event can see the leaders’ messages as well.
It’s easy to forget, as a ride leader, that this isn’t everyone else’s experience. Event chat is actually proximity-based for everyone else in the ride, meaning you only see other riders’ messages if you’re nearby. So as the ride spreads out, you end up with weird situations where, for example, someone asks the leader a question, but only a portion of the group sees the question. Then the leader messages the answer, and everyone on the ride sees that!
It’s not ideal. It’s confusing and reduces the amount of conversation and connection happening on community rides.
I’d love to see all riders able to see all chat, with proximity-based messaging perhaps automatically enabled for rare, massive events of 500 riders or more.
(Zwift could even get really fancy and enable some sort of smart proximity-based messaging happening if the number of messages gets too high. Maybe the game monitors the rate of messages, and if it’s more than, say, 1 per second for 10+ seconds, the game switches to proximity-based chat mode until the rate comes down. A simple indicator in the message composer could indicate whether you’re in proximity-based mode or not.)
#5: Post-Ride Stats
As the ride leader, I’d love to get some stats once my event finishes:
- Count of riders who joined the event
- Count of riders who finished the event
- Finish rate (Joined/Finished)
- Number of Ride Ons received in event
- Number of chat messages sent
- Total distance covered by all participants
- Total elevation climbed by all participants
I’d love to get these stats via an automated email, but they could also be made available, much like race results, in the Companion app and at zwift.com, so there’s a historical record of each event’s stats.
#6: Post-Ride Feedback
I’d love it if Zwift would pop up a simple survey at the end of each group ride, inviting riders to give feedback to the ride organizers. Maybe just a 1-5 star rating, with a space for comments?
A simple survey, perhaps different from a finisher’s survey, could even pop up for people who decide to duck out early. Maybe it just has a few options so Zwift and the ride organizer can understand why you left early?
- Ride is harder than expected
- My schedule doesn’t leave me enough time to finish
- Pace not as advertised
- Other
Like the event stats idea above, I’d love to see all this feedback in an email, along with access via Companion and the web.
An additional benefit from these survey results is that they could be used to help Zwifters pick events in the future, as repeating events could build up a reputation with their star ratings or other feedback. Zwift could summarize this feedback in game and Companion, and could even create special lists of top-rated events. For example, rides rated in the top 10% of all group rides could be on their own list and receive a simple visual indicator so they stand out from the crowd and get more participation.
#7: Encourage Repeat Signups
Speaking of building a reputation and encouraging signups, I’d love it if Zwift would make it easier for people to sign up for next week’s edition of an event immediately after they finish this week’s.
Right now, weekly events are re-created automatically via a nightly process that runs once every 24 hours. So after you complete a weekly event, doesn’t yet exist on the calendar. You have to wait until the following day to sign up.
What if instead, next week’s event was created 30 minutes after this week’s event began?
What if people could click to “subscribe” to an event and be automatically signed up for it each week?
Or what if, when you finish the event, a simple UI popped up asking if you want to sign up for next week’s event right now?
Your Thoughts
Those are my top ideas as a ride leader. But I’m sure other ride leaders will have other great ideas. Do you have any to add to my list? Share below!
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