Early Access to iOS Beta: Updated TrainerRoad

[OreoCookie]

I haven’t done workouts yet, but I found one bug and several issues. I will do my first workout with the beta later today, but I thought I’ll give the app a quick shake before I do.

I am using the app on a 12.9” iPad Pro (2018) with iOS 14.0.1 (the latest official release as of today).

Bug: first week of planned workouts shifted by a day

My training plan is a standard mid-volume plan with the first workout of the week being scheduled on Tuesdays (the default). Only the very first week of workouts is shifted by a week and only in the app. On the web calendar, everything appears as expected, workouts on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

UI Improvement: app makes extremely bad use

I have a 12.9” iPad and the app makes extremely bad use of the space. It seems to use the same list as on my phone. I would like to see a list like on the web in sufficiently large browser windows.

UI Improvement: Account window

There are several issues:

1. FTP is a measurement with units, and you should add “(W)” after FTP analogous to Weight.

2. The entry in weight does not handle significant digits correctly. It converts 73.0 into 73.

3. Specific power has the wrong units, it is not “FTP/kg” (FTP is not a unit and dividing it by kg makes no sense), but “W/kg”. I propose you change the label to something like “FTP/weight (W/kg)”.

4. The birthdate field does not use the iOS date picker, but a very cumbersome date picker.

[OreoCookie]

Ok, I have done two workouts back-to-back, and I have put the workout screen through its paces. It is rough. There are three issues that are close to show-stoppers for me, they significantly and unnecessarily increased my cognitive load. If I had to guess the reasons for those are two-fold: (1) It seems nobody has tested the app with a dumb trainer. And (2) nobody has tested the app with a 12.9” iPad.

For reference:

• 12.9” iPad Pro (2018)
• iOS 14.0.1
• 4iiii single-sided power meter (on a Shimano 6800-series crankarm)

Serious issue 1: Power bar bubble completely obscures the power bar

OMG, this drove me up the wall. I was not able to screenshot this, because if you are on a dumb trainer you really need to focus to keep your power constant. The issue is that the bubble that indicates the average interval power is so big that it extends over the entire height of the power bar. When I am in shape, I can usually stay within a +/- 5W window of the target power. I mostly use the power bar to do that, and we are only talking about a few pixels to the left or right of the line that indicates the target power. As a consequence and combined with Issue #2 below, I was usually 5-10 W over my target power.

The enlarged average power bubble completely obscures this, because in my case the center of the bubble is always close to the target power line.

Proposed solution: significantly shrink the average power bubble and/or increase the size of the power bar.

Serious issue 2: Power numbers flicker and fluctuate

As far as I understand my power meter sends power data every second. In the non-beta version of the TrainerRoad app, my power number would update every second. Since I am on a dumb trainer, I need to process the current power and see if I should slightly back down and push slightly harder to hit my target power.

With the beta, the power would update not just once, but roughly every second, my power numbers would update several times in quick succession. This means I have to focus way more on my power number. Combined with the average power bubble obscuring my current power level, this made it very hard to hit my power numbers. Usually I was 5-10 W over my target power.

Proposed solution: Update the power numbers only once a second.

Serious issue 3: Workout text is completely unreadable due to small font size

I use a 12.9” iPad Pro also because I wear glasses and everything is bigger. But the workout text is really, really small. It is so small that I couldn’t read it in an oxygen-deprived state.

Proposed solution: Increase font size so that it covers 80 % of the width of the iPad. Feel free to use more than one line.

I have noticed plenty of other, smaller issues as well.

UI Issue: Wasted space on 12.9” iPad, numbers and figures too small

One reason why I love using TR on my iPad is that the previous version would choose font sizes to fill my entire screen. The new version no longer does that. This makes everything harder to read.

Cosmetic Issue: Start Workout is not visually centered

I noticed that the Start Workout button is not visually centered.

Localization bug #1: Onboarding screen in the wrong language

The onboarding login screen was in German for some reason. (I am German, but my iPad is set to US English. My date & time format prefs are a mixture of German and Japanese.) The rest of the beta is in English. I don’t know whether this was a spurious bug due to the TrainerRoad app not reading the language prefs correctly or something else.

Expected behavior: The TR app respects the chosen language in iOS’s Settings app.

Localization bug #2: End time does not respect Date & Time preferences in iOS’s Settings

The End Time uses the US time format even though I use 24h time format in iOS’s Settings.

Expected behavior: TR app conforms to the chosen Time & Date format in iOS’s Settings.

[OreoCookie]

One more issue concerning the list of workouts:

Duplicate/deleted workouts appearing in list of workouts

In several circumstances, I have had deleted workouts appearing. Once I aborted a workout, the second time I associated one workout with another workout.

[jtuk]

If you go to the App Store you can reinstall the general release version and it will replace the beta app.

[bbarrera]

Upgraded from production app a couple days ago. Had to pair with Kickr again and then was unable to dismiss calibrate messages:

And

Workaround: force quit the app and restarted.

Another bug - after workaround was surprised to see Stages dual sided was now paired both left and right sides.

[fabriciod]

The same happened to me. What time did you start the workouts? Mine were past 9:30pm

[brianv17]

I came across several bugs today on my iPhone:

1. Completed workouts show up on the wrong day. Using the mobile app, I changed the order of my Saturday workout with my Sunday workout. After that, the app displayed them in the incorrect order:

2. Erg mode wasn’t responding during today’s workout with new power match (Kickr Snap with Stages L pm). First I tried to calibrate the trainer using the app, but app just displayed a spinning busy symbol (even thought it showed a BT connection). I power cycle the trainer which then allowed me to do a spin-down. But at the start of the next interval, the problem remained. It was solved by restarting the app and resuming the workout.

[bbarrera]

Still on the trainer… started around 8:45pm PDT

[nyfc]

UI issue/not expected choice. After I click on an upcoming workout I expect to be able to swipe right from the edge of the screen to get back to calendar. That doesn’t seem to happen. I have to click at the top “previous” to go back.

Swipe right seems to work elsewhere.

Also, after editing a completed run/swim to add TSS or other data I expect there to be an option to save and close as a single step. It feels weird to have to click save. Then click back.

[JS84]

Thanks @Pete the last fix addressed my issues with assioma pedals and the screen going to sleep.
I didn’t notice other issues on my last workout, but I’ll keep testing.

[dragan]

I’ve been on the beta for a couple of weeks now and I haven’t found any serious bugs, and overall the impression is that the app is much improved.

However, I’m wondering if the performance is tied to my phone (iPhone 7) or is it just something which has not yet been prioritized? The app is painfully slow in all aspects, sometimes even completely unresponsive. Tactile feedback is 100% absent so sometimes I am not sure if I mistapped or it’s just loading things very slowly (this is almost always the case).

Someone also mentioned how slow the results are appearing after the workout, which I initially chalked up to the overall sluggishness of the app.

One other thing I’d like to note is the use of your brand color (red) for primary actions within the app. This is a really tricky UX situation since the whole world generally assumes red = bad, error and green = good, success. This in turn always makes me (as a user) think about what I’m tapping on which increases my cognitive load, which in turn results in an impression that the app is difficult to use. I guess this is my suggestion for your UX designers to rethink their design decision to use the brand color for primary actions.

[wysbf2]

Downloaded to iPad at the weekend, and did my first workout today. My observations:

• I like the general look & feel. I might actually use the calendar and workout library in the app now, rather than using my browser exclusively.
• pairing with my Tickr HR strap and Neo 2T trainer was dead easy
• the workout screen is similar to before, which is mostly a good thing as I like the simple layout
• estimated end time of workout is a nice touch
• I tried to switch between Resistance & Erg during a workout for the first time ever today… it took several attempts, lots of swearing and knocking over my iPad to hit the tiny 3-dot button to access the menu. Seriously, make the button 5 times bigger or just get rid of it! (I know that hasn’t changed since the current prod app, it’s just the first time I’ve tried to use it during a workout)
• the app crashed several times during my workout, and wouldn’t resume the workout when I restarted it. The crash seeemed to be caused by large changes in target power in a custom workout (high to low, and low to high). I hit the button to submit crash logs, but can provide more info to Support if that helps?

[pnstover]

Hi - a few notes after a few days of using on iPhone XS:

• I’ve added annotations using the app. On 2 of 3 occasions the app would hang when I hit “save”.
• I was doing a recovery ride today on Recess. I usually do this for 90min, but there was no longer an “Extend Warm-up” button to extend it from 60min.

Thanks!

[OreoCookie]

A few more bugs here:

Bug: Start Workout layover briefly flickers onto screen at a resistance change

This happened to me on one of my workouts on Sunday. It only happened once, and I do not know how to reproduce it.

Bug: In some workouts, the change resistance beep is too late

During today’s workout, the beep that you hear before a resistance change was about 5 seconds late. Instead of three beeps I only got the first one.

UI issue: Touch targets on go back chevron way too small

The go back chevron’s touch targets seems to be only the chevron rather than also e. g. the text next to it. While this may make sense, it requires too much dexterity and precision — both come at a premium during or after hard intervals.

I have tested and reproduced this issue on both, my iPhone 7 and my 12.9" iPad Pro (2018).

Proposed solution: Significantly increase the touch targest.

UI issue: Calibration screen not adapted to larger screen sizes of iPads, especially 12.9" iPad Pros

The screen is plain ugly and hard to use as all pertinent UI elements are kilometers apart.

Usability issue: Calibration value not displayed on in-workout power meter calibration screen

I have another issue with the same calibration screen: it no longer displays any value. Preferably, it should display the before and the after value. This way, users can detect large drifts that indicate a problem with their setup.

UI issue: Legend for power profile can be partially off-screen (12.9" iPad Pro (2018))

Another big issue is the workout preview. It comes in from the right and barely uses any space even though I have tons left on my iPad. What is worse, when I want to check the power profile, when I arrive at the second half of the workout, the legend with the power data and duration is partially off-screen and becomes unreadable.

UI improvement: display workout times more appropriately

The length of TrainerRoad’s workouts is always quantized in minutes and there are no workouts that are longer than 9:59:59. So the duration should be formatted accordingly, rather than 00:30:00, it would be easier to read “0:30 h” or “30 mins”. There are iOS APIs that do this automatically. You can configure them to display either e. g. 90 mins or 1:30 h or something similar. My podcast client displays 30m, and it is perfectly clear from the context what the implied unit is.

[cjuleff]

Hi. I experienced an issue with losing device connectivity mid ride. I experienced this this with the previous beta but thought it was a once off. Not sure if this is an iOS or app issue. I unfortunately had to force close app and restart.

Don’t recall ever seeing this on the normal iOS app version.

[shafwaan]

Did you manage to get this sorted? I’m having the same issue but I am using last official release of TR on iOS rather than the beta.

Thanks

[wysbf2]

Interesting - I have a Neo 2T and have never been prompted to calibrate on either the current Prod app, or the Beta.

[aydraper]

@Pete

Did my first workout on my iPad Air (been doing them in my iPhone up until now). Did a ramp test. The text size was small relative to all the screen space for Chad’s comments.

Also at each ramp when it flashed the data, the text was so big it cut cadence down to “cade”

[adski]

Does anyone else think that today’s workout would make a great widget on iOS?

[bbarrera]

Nice!