My opinion: There are some poor UI choices in the updated Activity viewing interface on the Android app (February 2025 update). This is the interface you see when you click on an activity in your feed.
1) Half the screen, upon clicking, is Strava’s terrible default map (and not the map chosen by the user, e.g. “Dirt”, etc). Photos should be the key attraction.
- Photos are what make people click an activity. The new interface hides the most interesting feature and it replaces with Strava's WORST POSSIBLE MAP OPTION (my opinion).
- This “default map”, which takes up half the page, should either be updated or killed. It shows ALMOST NOTHING USEFUL. No town names, no surface types (dirt vs pavement), no scale bars or mileage markers to indicate distance. It's just a route shape with little meaningful context -- and takes up half the screen in this view.
- Clicking the map... Gives almost nothing extra. You get town names, but no other useful context. For instance, if I chose DIRT as my default map, shouldn't this map show surface type?
- It seems like an objectively a poor map interface. Anytime anybody tries to show me where they've ridden using Strava, they give up and open another app instead (Google Maps, RidewithGPS, etc). It's almost impossible to find a zoom level that shows the road names that are part of the route, while still being zoomed out enough to show context, among other UI issues. This map doesn’t leverage so many of Strava’s useful mapping/routing features. It seems like a waste.
2) Photos are hidden beyond a tiny little box/button. And clicking that box doesn't take you to the full-screen photos! It gives you a square (i.e. terribly cropped) highlight image. Swiping brings you to the next image, meaning YOU NEVER SEE THE UNCROPPED VERSION OF THE HIGHLIGHT IMAGE! It gets skipped. That's seems like a poor design.
3) When looking at photos in this mode, FIGURE CAPTIONS ARE INVISIBLE. There's not even an indication that there MIGHT be a caption, so you don't know that you should click the photo to see it. Want to see the figure captions? It's like a game of whack-a-mole. Click. Is there a caption? No. Exit from photo (b/c you can't just scroll to the next one). Click the next photo. Is there a caption? No? Exit photo. *If your goal is to remove the utility of photo captions completely, well, congratulations. You did it!*
4) In the "slideshow" of photos, portrait photos are cut off on the edges, but landscape photos are uncropped and letterboxed. Why this inconsistent mix? Just show the entire photo (uncropped) since you are in photo viewing mode. If you are going to crop a photo, give a clear visual indication that it is cropped, so users can choose to click and see the whole thing. But it would be better not to crop the image at all. Exceptions could be made for extreme aspect ratios (e.g., panorama images).
Thanks for (hopefully) considering to this feedback!
