Zwift Update Version 1.73 (134871) Released

Can Zwift read L/R balance from a Tacx Neo?

will the new elevation display show the road which we are actually on, or will it be like the old (current) display which shows a random climb in the area which isn’t necessarily the route that you are currently following…?

if they’ve fixed that, it will be a very positive step

Are you sure about this part? I rode a few different words today and the elevation on the bottom line of my minmap was the route profile not the “section” I was on. This is a change. Is there more elevation profile changes coming or did they accidently release it now?

“There is just one HUD element we saw in the original previews of the new HUD that isn’t included in this update: it’s the full route profile and details in the right HUD beneath the minimap. Zwift tells us this is still in the works and will be released in the next few weeks – it just needs a bit more polish.”

Not sure about other trainers but my Zwift Hub no longer has race mode since this update.

The climbing thing looks a reasonable improvement although I’ve no update to have tried it. Precisely my issue having not explored vastly in zwift was when the grade starting going up 3, 4, 5% not knowing if this was going to be something I could quickly use a big effort to push or if I had to sit up and get ready for a longer climbing stint. Now I use virtual gearing that’s not too bad because you can change gear whenever. When I had real gearing and tried 100% trainer difficulty, it was a real pain when the gradient rose unexpectedly.

Glancing at your pictures the first thing that strikes me is that the biggest faults with the UI remain. There doesn’t appear to be anyone with UI design skills hired at zwift who has given them the (long) list of foobars and faults. It’s like the ‘programmer art’ version of a UI.

I don’t pretend to have UI design skill either, but some of the flaws here are so egregious that you don’t need to in order to see them.

The biggest culprit that anyone can see is that zwift puts unimportant information in a larger bolder font and the more key information underneath in smaller and smaller letters. You know, no one cares the riders around them name and country flag more than they care about their pace and distance away do they? And, perhaps some people have a big enough screen close enough to them that it doesn’t matter, but a lot of users won’t.

Which brings us to the second biggest flaw is that the game works or claims to work on a variety of devices but little effort appears to have gone into making the UI work well with them all. At the extreme, for phones this is especially egregious since phones pretty much for the past 2 decades (precisely because they have a smaller display) have contained a variety of features and UI design to let people make small text and images bigger, which zwift has disabled or not used at all. The end result is, unfortunately, most of the user base has routed around the damage and they don’t use these devices and they’re slowly bitrotting.

I get that we’re probably not wanting to zoom in whilst riding along, but for the few miserable zwift sessions I had using my phone I couldn’t even read the route selection screen to pick a route, pacer ride or event.

The companion app has useful utility for wifi connecting our devices, but the only way I can put my phone on my bars is horizontally which means I can’t read that easily. Why is it vertical only? Especially things like the dashboard. I can’t see it very well but I thought I would hide the hud and use the dashboard but it doesn’t have gear information?

Secondly when I’m riding along looking at the screen in first or third person it makes no sense for me to have to keep looking up to the top left to see my data. I ideally want my data just below the centre of the screen where I’m looking at my character (or, in first person, at the road) Nor does it make much sense that my data is in variety of different font sizes.

Ok with this one you might have a reasonable argument that power data is more important than the others, but it’s a struggle to read the other data on many displays. If you work at zwift and own a garmin or wahoo computer, take it out now and look at the options to configure the data screens. They let you pick how big stuff is right, what you see and where it is. Look at the size of these devices, smaller than a phone, yet millions of cyclists have them on their stem reading the data on them. Look at the size of the garmin device that has a map, it’s a tiny display relative to a phone – yet it works. zwift UI is terribly broken by comparison – I need a huge display (relatively speaking) to be able to read it well – and ok, I get that zwift is displaying a picture of the road and other cyclists that my garmin doesn’t, but, by and large it’s not the display of the 3d that is broken – when I used my phone I could see myself riding along reasonably well. I just could barely see my wattage and practically see nothing else.

And, now I’ve switched to a laptop it’s only marginally better there are still UI elements that are not readable at the same time as other elements, that I have really no need to read are large and cartoon like.

And the same is true whether you’re riding or selecting somewhere to ride, UI elements are oversized while others – containing pertinent information like the w/kg of the robopacer, the amount of climbing or the distance are much smaller than need be.

The zwift guys need to sit down and decide whether they are developing code for a variety of devices which will be at a variety of distances from the rider or if they’ve given up on that and are just going to support a large TV close to the rider. Pick one or the other, tell everyone and then commit to that. If it’s “support lots of devices and screen sizes” you’ll have some work to do.

Each of those riders will want to read the information. You can’t just create a UI that’s great if you have a 55″ or larger TV close to you. That’s the first problem to solve.

The second problem is to let users put the screen elements where they want to see them – I want to see my gear, wattage etc right underneath the centre, as I said above, so I can look where my virtual self is riding and see it without having to look around the screen.

Next, a choice of ‘Show everything or nothing’ is too coarse grained, we should be able to switch on and off the hud elements we want to see. Ultimately we should be able to define a set of custom huds with our choices of panels and UI elements / data on each and cycle through them (just like you can on a garmin cycle computer)

Zwift community could then create huds and share them. Zwift isn’t good at hud design or fast at software development, so I’d suggest outsourcing this one to the community, create only a default hud and whatever the community needs to create huds and share them, add the functionality to cycle through huds and then sit back and watch the community design the UI for you.

(This is true of route creation too, give the community the tools to create routes – most of the poor design decisions in zwift are on the false premise that “zwift is social”, e.g the fact we can’t choose to ride in whatever world we want. This is supposedly so the worlds don’t feel empty, but it’s just terrible design forcing people to do something they don’t want to do – clearly building routes by hand is both expensive and slow and the obvious thing to do is to let other people do that who you don’t have to pay)

(If a game is social that means you add features that let people group together and then the people who want group rides can easily find and join each other. It shouldn’t mean when you’re going for a pizza by yourself you force a bunch of strangers to go to the same restaurant by closing all the others so you don’t feel lonely – that mentality is sociopathic not social)

Similarly, in UI terms, there’s far too much space given up to strangers – as I’ve already said, usually with the most pointless piece of information about the stranger made bolder and bigger and the key data small. If I am looking at the UI to see a leaderboard, I want to see the times at least as prominently, if not moreso, than who set the time. And similarly for who is riding around near me, if they are speeding up or I want to see how far ahead I have to squint to see that, but their name is bigger and bolder? And these take up so much space on the display. Fine if you have a big display, but it’s wasted space for someone on a smaller display who primarily needs to see their own data – perhaps the solution for a small phone is only seeing your own data – but right now you can’t do that, it’s all or nothing – and when the text is so small that actually means it’s nothing or nothing.

The bottom line is : zwift needs a highly skilled UI designer or three to work on it – but, as I said, giving the hud over to the community might be the cheaper and easier option. You’ll note many FPS games have a variety of community designed huds to replace the default. The upside, people can have the UI they want without impacting the development of the game – they can work on all the other things. The downside – updates to the game can break these huds, which means switching back to the default, waiting for an update after the update.

Since the update I can’t pair my HRM Garmin (battery is full). bug?

Configurable fields I’d love to see and that you have already suggested above – NP and lap stats via some sort of lap button.

Oh no! With “close the gap” this thing covers half of the screen. Why can’t they just make it customizable, too? Or at least give one the chance to switch it off…

The elevation is nice for free-riding, but in races it takes away surprise attacks 😒

Eric, I have one issue that bugs me. I like to do Free Ride but if I encounter a Group Ride on that same ride that I overtake, or more likely overtakes me, then my progress display changes assuming I want to join the group. To get my route info back I have establish a big enough gap from the group. Very annoying
Terry

As someone who has used it for 2 days – as it’s intended – as an indoor cycling platform in a virtual world, I think the revised HUD is great. I look forward to further iterations of the UI.

Just updated on ATV in UK 👍