Training Plans
The title of the training plans would be clickable. Once you click on a plan it would scroll you to that plan and open up the plan modal.
We thought about adding an “end plan” marker on the calendar but that’s still up in the air. It can get a bit confusing especially when you start to do lots of outside rides on your plan. We thought just showing the start date might be for the best.
Race Priority
The red A/B/C represent race priority. If you have multiple races in the same week we’ll show the highest priority with the “stacked” icon on it. So if you had two C and one A race in a week we’d show the A race stacked symbol.
Months
Pretty simple here, we just added a row that shows months in three-month blocks. I think this makes it easier to see where things are.
What do you think? For the above three goals, did we achieve them?
Note: We still have plans to do more, like restrict it to just swim/bike/run training stress at one time.
I clicked the image before I read the descriptions of what it meant. Then I read the descriptions and it was all exactly what I expected from looking at the image. So, yes.
I may not be understanding what happens when you click on a training plan name, but it’s not clear how helpful it would be to do so.
1). Start is clear and stop is implied, good. Typography/readability is going to be clunky for long plan names, which you can already see, especially on smaller screens (i.e. a 1366px laptop)… Line breaks on long plan names to another line could cause other issues. Maybe just show pipes for starts with the ability to mouse over to see the plan name (and.or more detail)? Use-case here is most users will know what their planning entails and not need to constantly see the names. Additional use case is if you are going back in time and don’t quite remember what it is you do need to ability to see it. Mouse over should cover that and solve the typography & small screen issues. Less is more here.
2). Visually, they make sense and do the job. Nit-picking though is maybe there is another shape. the diamond works well for FTP as it visually points to the week line and even though it is wider than the green week bar it doesn’t cause any alignment issues. The square is too wide for the green bar (because it needs the letter code in it). Maybe look at a square with a triangle point down? A circle? What happens if I have multiple races? is that what the stacking shows? So will the A race always take priority on the top?
3). Nailed it.
Make sure the user is able to show/hide the plan start and races off though (and remember my preference). Month/date is good and would be fine to not have said control. The “legend” can be a simple checkbox selection to do that.
The simplicity of the are is wonderful right now. I can only assume you have more roadmap enhancements to add (your italics at the end of your post) to this so having the ability to show/hide data layers form the start is important to keep that simplicity and give the user choice as to how they see things.
This is a great direction. I was still using my other spreadsheet a bit to see the broader picture. This should help get a closer idea of the relative timing of plans to events.
The proposed changes take a good step in the right direction.
I almost want the ability to expand that view to near full screen, which could allow more detail (like seeing the individual events that are stacked in the “condensed” version.
That could be a totally different issue with expanded control and/or visibility.
An option for plan display might be to use the line for the start and a shaded region for that plan length. Then you could see when it ends, maybe with less clutter.
The problem I foresee is what happens when you want overlap between plans?
The lines would still be there and maybe the “starting” plan colored region takes priority? Just a thought, but it may help people plan gaps or overlaps as desired (or make sure not to have them), by being able to see the full plan sizing.
Yet another option to show plan length, would be to use shading but only show that when you mouse over or hover on the plan name. Might not work on mobile?
I see the months are skipping every other month. I presume that is to save space and maybe handle smaller displays (mobile) better? It is a bit odd with the gaps.
Maybe you could include the lines for each month section, even if you leave out text on some spacing?
Not specifically part of your pic or question, but I find scrolling the Calendar easy to get lost. So how about adding the month abbreviation to all days, not just the month start? Then we will know which month we are seeing, especially on smaller displays when we aren’t seeing the first day.
I don’t see much value to that modal. Opening a new window / tab with the whole plan (i.e. all the workouts broken out by week) seems helpful, but that’s a really big and detailed modal to say “Cross-Country Olympic MTB.”
Re: “end plan” marker… it might be nice (maybe, not sure) to somehow show if say work causes me to push week3 and extend a 6 or 8 week plan into a 7 or 9 week plan. Or if I decide during SSB to go with extra recovery week, say 3 weeks on and 1 week off. But on the flip side I’d argue the green bars already show me that. This is somewhat starting to cross the line into a plan compliance discussion, so I’ll just drop it as I can argue “end plan” marker both ways.
I like it but I’d also like the ability to self define plans as well. I like to adapt some of your plans, in your mock up would I have to apply a plan before making changes within it to still maintain the plan title?
In the same vein I had a 4 week period to fill before a race earlier this year and created a training block of my own from the workout library. It would be great to be be able to name blocks like these to something of significance to me as well as see the base, build and speciality plans.
I’m really not digging the current modal stuff, by that I mean open Calendar and click on a completed or TBD workout. I understand you need a UX for assigning, however the current implementation seems a little clunky for my most common use case which is wanting a quick reveal of TBD workout description. For example lets say my next workout is Clark, I’d like to hover over that in calendar and have the description appear:
Clark is 6x8-minute efforts between 88-94% FTP directly preceded by a 12-second round of big gear, high-force stomps.
3 minutes of recovery separate intervals.
sure seems like a “hover and reveal” UX would be handy, given I rarely need to assign. Not sure how to solve the assign UX as I haven’t thought about it.
right now I get a modal, then I click on something and it opens another browser tab. I’m not against tabs, have plenty in every browser window. Just seems like a whole lotta clicking to get access to the things I need most when referring to stuff in the Calendar.
In any case, the reason for that long explanation is that I feel a “hover and reveal” on plan name might also work assuming the plan summary/description is the quick action most people want.
Yes. The red box doesn’t overlap into another week either.
Yes
Yup. That might not be at first launch but it will come shortly after. Especially as we add stuff. We’ll probably have some stuff off by default, then remember how you like it setup.
The hard part is the shade really makes the graph look cluttered, plus the overlapping of plans like you said…and then you get into the situation where you don’t know when a plan ends unless you add another marker.
I agree with you on the month stuff on the Calendar. I think we’ll do something to adjust that after we’ve made some other improvements.
Yes, the plan start is disconnected from the first workout now. So you can add a plan, then totally change it and the tag is still there.
It sounds like you’re asking for custom plans. That’s been on my wishlist for a long time, but it’s always been pushed down.
Another idea we had was the ability to mark an annotation that was visible on the Training Stress graph. This could be turned on/of in the legend. If we did that you could accomplish the above (at least by marking custom areas of training).
We’re fixing that. You’re going to see a lot of improvements in that box over the next 2 months. We knew where we were going so it’s more of a placeholder than big value creator right now.
The idea is to let you easily understand the workout and/or change the workout without having to open tabs.
Another idea around plan start/stops… is LOVE to see my seasons displayed in the same way. Sometimes together and where they overlap. If I can show/hide those two together at my will… awesome!
