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I’m on team Blame Strava. When you have an obvious comprehension failure by large numbers of users, it’s a UX design bug. Don’t blame the users. It’s pretty cl

I’m on team Blame Strava. When you have an obvious comprehension failure by large numbers of users, it’s a UX design bug. Don’t blame the users. It’s pretty clear why in this case. The privacy settings are overcomplicated and misleading. It’s not intuitive at all that turning on “enhanced privacy” still includes you in route leaderboards and the heatmap, which you might not even know is a thing. This was bad design.

tinymollusk 9y ago
I'd go one step further, and blame our growth obsessed startup culture. So many incentives to get people to share so a product can go "viral". Strava has a number of anti-patterns that make it difficult to do what you want with the app, rather than what they want you to do. (Share! Tell your friends! Brag about how fast you just ran this! Compare yourself to others!) I think this news-event and some of the struggles Facebook has are highly similar (they're experiencing the pullback after years of inducing users to help them game their numbers).
flukus 9y ago
I don't blame strava for this incident because it's obvious that your information is being sent to them and there must be some onus on users, maybe there should even be some pain until the message sinks in. What isn't obvious is if they are retaining the information or who they are sharing it with, etc. For my non-social uses there is no reason that the data really needs to leave my phone but it does anyway. We need much better consumer laws here and these things need to be made obvious and with explicit permission given by the user for each step. In any case, I've found tech like this is more of a distraction and offers no real value. I'm a lot happier now that I've deleted strava, stopped using fitbit, removed my bike computer and gone back to basics. It feels like I can just go for a bike ride again without having to start recording and analyze all the feedback. It's like that feeling when you throw out all those kitchen gadgets you never used.

tinymollusk 9y ago

I'd go one step further, and blame our growth obsessed startup culture. So many incentives to get people to share so a product can go "viral". Strava has a number of anti-patterns that make it difficult to do what you want with the app, rather than what they want you to do. (Share! Tell your friends! Brag about how fast you just ran this! Compare yourself to others!) I think this news-event and some of the struggles Facebook has are highly similar (they're experiencing the pullback after years of inducing users to help them game their numbers).

flukus 9y ago

I don't blame strava for this incident because it's obvious that your information is being sent to them and there must be some onus on users, maybe there should even be some pain until the message sinks in. What isn't obvious is if they are retaining the information or who they are sharing it with, etc. For my non-social uses there is no reason that the data really needs to leave my phone but it does anyway. We need much better consumer laws here and these things need to be made obvious and with explicit permission given by the user for each step. In any case, I've found tech like this is more of a distraction and offers no real value. I'm a lot happier now that I've deleted strava, stopped using fitbit, removed my bike computer and gone back to basics. It feels like I can just go for a bike ride again without having to start recording and analyze all the feedback. It's like that feeling when you throw out all those kitchen gadgets you never used.