Zwift’s design team has been hard at work creating an updated UI, and at a recent media event they shared details of the redesigned homescreen. Here’s a peek at what Zwift will be releasing in the coming months…
Design Goals
The homescreen redesign has been a long time coming, but the influx of new users (thanks, Covid) coupled with a company-wide refocus on core experience has helped Zwift prioritize key deliverables for this redesign, namely:
- Make content (especially social events) more accessible: instead of events residing in a small corner of the screen, make them front and center. This will reduce the time it takes to find and start an activity, as well as surfacing more social activities for Zwifters to try.
- Easier to use: the improved layouts are more intuitive and powerful with consistent navigation elements at the top, better filtering tools, and more. The new layouts will also play nicely with controllers used across various platforms (looking at you, Apple TV!)
Activities Screen
The initial homescreen view brings up a list of upcoming events, as well as several “Just Ride” options for anyone who doesn’t want to join a group event.
I’m not sure how the “My Activities” and “Just Ride” options are selected for display, but Zwift definitely has the opportunity here to surface content in an intelligent way that really appeals to a particular Zwifter. For example:
- “My Activities” should show any event or meetup you’re currently signed up for (of course)
- “My Actitivities” could also show weekly events you’ve taken part in before, making it easy for Zwifters to build a habit and get to know others by consistently riding together.
- “Just Ride” could suggest routes on today’s scheduled worlds where the rider hasn’t yet earned the route badge
- If a rider consistently chooses a particular free ride route, show that as a “Just Ride” option to make it easy
Upcoming Events
The new homescreen’s events browser is receiving a big upgrade, giving Zwifters the ability to browse events in game with similar tools as the Companion app. That includes filtering events by type, group, and more. Clicking on an event brings up a full detail view where you can read the description and select a group to sign up.
Browsing events Event detail view
Note: all of the screenshots supplied by Zwift indicate “Design work in progress”, so these layouts have not yet been finalized. That said, I would like to see some indication of which route an event is being held on so we know what we’re signing up to ride!
Routes Browser
The updated routes browser is accessible from an icon at the top-left. Some of the information available here is already available in the current routes browser, but it’s getting a helpful redesign plus the addition of:
- A difficulty ranking (1-5 scale)
- A time estimate in minutes (based on data showing 85% of Zwifters can complete it in X minutes)
- The amount of XP you’ll earn if it’s your first time completing the route
- More sorting options including Duration, Name, Effort, Distance, Elevation, and Route Completion
Browsing routes Route details
What I Like About It
There’s a lot to love in Zwift’s planned homescreen redesign. Here are five things that stick out to me:
- Focus on events: every avatar in Zwift has a real person behind it, and events are where we can best connect with others and benefit from the encouragement and comraderie which ensues. In-game interaction is Zwift’s special sauce, and this redesign puts events front and center, where they should have been all along.
- Garage + Drop Shop access: we can easily access our Garage (and the Drop Shop) from an icon at the top-right. This is a common request from Zwifters who (for example) want to switch their bike frame/wheels before starting their ride.
- Event details: far to many Zwifters join events from the current homescreen and thus never see the event duration or full description. This redesign makes that information obvious.
- Route details: giving routes a difficulty rating as well as a time estimate should prove very helpful, especially to newer riders who can’t look at distance+elevation and decide if that route is suitable on a given day.
- Looking good: to my eyes, the new design is cleaner, more modern, and more intuitive than the current homescreen. It will be a welcome upgrade that will drive the redesign of the rest of the game’s UI.
Not a Full UI Redesign
It’s important to note that this is a homescreen redesign, not a full redesign of the entire Zwift game UI. Other screens such as the Drop Shop/Garage, Pairing Screen, and in-game main menu will not be redesigned in this initial rollout. But certainly, the new homescreen is a key first step that will inspire and drive further UI improvements down the road.
Release Date
Zwift says a phased rollout is planned to begin in December 2021 and finish in early 2022.
Your Thoughts
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Well that’s great! Thanks for the update on this Eric. This kind of content is why I keep coming back to Zi!
Hopefully they’re going to bring the entire UI into the 2020’s after this. And…
Really useful stuff, thanks for the heads up Eric!
This is good news!
Being able to access the drop shop/garage, pairing screen, and menu from the homepage will be huge improvements. Generally, I’ve chosen my events in advance, so having that take up a lot of real estate on top isn’t all that useful to me, but I can see how some people would find that helpful. I like that it looks like there is a dedicated Pace Partners button (does this mean that they’d no longer be futureworks?). I get annoyed that I first have to move the suggested world to Watopia on the homepage before they’ll show up currently. I don’t… Read more »
It would be nice if you could set up sessions from here. Like start with Pace Partner D for first ~10 minutes, and then move to Pace Partner C or B after a warm up and have it smoothly transition like it does for other upcoming events. I hate having to stop riding, click finish ride, and start over again to move to faster Pace Partner after warming up.
I’ve thought about this problem, too. Another solution would be a longer and in some kind adaptive pedal assist. For example limited to a certain maximum time like maybe 10 min (or longer, combined with a drop penalty to make it fair), assisting you with a certain % of the pace partner’s power as a starting point which could be adapted by a bias setting as used in trainings. This way you could also save your whole pace partner ride in one activity.
That idea would work too, I’d even be okay with missing out of the drops or just the bonus until the assist ended. I hate having to stop my workout that much, but I do like that I can get in some good SST with other people using the Pace Partners. Even a maximum of 15 minutes of the assist would be plenty.
Looks very promising! 😀 Will we be able to join pens directly from there or will we still have to start a ride and wait (and sometimes hope) for the pop-up to come up? For me, that would be the next big step after being able to go back to the home screen when ending a ride. Or is this feature even implemented already and I have missed it all the time?!
No mention of access to workouts, and nothing obvious on the images. Anything to say about these?
I’d guess workouts would be under the “bar graph” icon next to the world icon on the left. It’s incredibly difficult to design icons which will be obvious to everyone, so it’s natural that we’d explore and find these things.
Overall, these changes look good to me. It’s great to see Zwift making changes which look well thought out and which they’re showing to key people like Eric in advance so they can get key feedback if needed.
The workout interface is the worst part of the current UI, certainly on Apple TV at least. It’s not accessible through Companion, either. It must be getting filters, right? Headers like “Academy 2019” tell me nothing about what is in the folder. And Favorites? And maybe being able to hide workouts I’m never going to do? If Fulgaz had a more diverse workout library I may have already taken a break from paying for Zwift.
Zwift didn’t show us any previews, unfortunately. I sure hope it’s getting refreshed on some level, though!
Looks like a useful upgrade. Would prefer *actual* game UI changes.
I expect that this will be useful for new users though.
I cannot see the map of the route. Only after clicking. Poorly prefer the current menu.
Thanks for the update….I just hope that these changes will allow Zwift to continue to work on older operating systems, especially on old Macs
What i see is a lot of whitespace and useless pictures instead of compact lists – just like on the website today. I’d like to have a simple calendar to find my event next monday without scrolling for three days, or a large detail view for an event without the need to check zwiftpower to find out on which route a group ride will take place. I’m propably too old for this.
Looks pretty decent but why would they release a new UI that’s clearly not optimized for mobile devices and Apple TV?
If you claim the reason behind your hardware push is to ease the onboarding process, why would you design a UI that looks like it’s made for desktops instead of tablets/phones and the Apple TV remote?
I’m not suggesting they should just copy the Peloton UI but at least take a look at what’s clearly working in the real world and gets good reviews from actual UX designers.