Does anyone actually use the Trophy Case?

Hello - thanks for bringing this up and sharing your perspective. It will be interesting to hear thoughts and feedback from others on this topic.  

I don't - honestly I think there's too many trophies for it to really be meaningful. I would love to see actual usage metrics behind trophies. How many people click trophies on another users profile, how many view their own trophies, etc. Also the fact that bad data in activities is rampant devalues trophies even more when challenges can be completed by people cheating or just uploading activities with bad GPS/wrong activity.

I don't use it. I don't even know what you're talking about, so if the feature went away I wouldn't miss it.

(goes to see what you're talking about)

Oh, no, I don't use that at all. I also don't do much to earn trophies, I only have 4. I'm not the target market for this feature.

Hi @dantsai, this is a great question, and there are probably myriad ways that athletes on Strava use challenge badges, or don't. Badges are a great way for some athletes to find motivation, either by reviewing their previous accomplishments or eyeing their next goal. Others may use them for tracking purposes–you will know if you hit your monthly goal if you complete a monthly Strava challenge with a cumulative goal, for example, and then you can review your successes over time. We also hear from athletes that they'd like to remove all or certain badges at some point after completion, whereas others would like a physical commemoration of their accomplishment. Athletes come from all walks of life. We appreciate your feedback here though, and hopefully, we'll get more insight from athletes joining this conversation. 

Leaving a challenge will remove the badge from your profile page, too. It's easier to leave a challenge while it's still open and in the gallery. If a challenge has closed already, you can use the badge to revisit the challenge page. This can be more easily completed through the app too, as you can then leave most closed challenges by navigating into the eligibility rules screen from the challenge page. If this isn't possible, our support team can usually help as well. 

I enjoyed the Trophy Case for a few months when I first got into fitness. Then it got filled with the same trophies from the same monthly Challenges, and the novelty quickly wore off. Now it’s filled with a million trophies from obscure Challenges I complete mechanically, and whose names mean nothing to me, so I am ironically even less interested.

I think that real estate should be repurposed to showcase something more meaningful, like K/QoMs, Top 10s, and Local Legends (whichever you have, if you have them), fastest 5k, or some other recent accomplishment. It could even be used to offer a personal challenge based on our recent efforts. Something that keeps things fresh and makes us want to pause and take a closer look.

The larger issues with Trophies is that they’re repetitive, and even the more exotic ones remain variations of “complete X metric of activity this month.” This is fun for people just getting started, but what’s more interesting long term are statistics and progress indicators. Give us trophies/awards for reaching milestones (“Congrats on running your 1000ᵗʰ mile!”), and dangle a carrot for the next one, rather than for doing the same thing we’ve been doing every week.