Create a listing page "difficulty rating" that's easy to browse.

[onewheelskyward]

The original request:

"Hello I'm Matthew fietta, I've been thinking about if there was a scale for how difficult a ride is. This would help people know weather the can do the ride or maybe on nights and days where there are a lot of rides happening close to the same time they could pick another ride that would suite them better. Weather it's how fit they are or what they are up for that night or a disability that mean they can't ride fast enough to keep up with the pack."

Summary: A top level traffic-light style difficulty rating that we can imbue from distance (with a potential multiplier by ride is/not a loop) so people can more easily choose their rides based on how rad they'd like to get.

Some issues: I don't think ride length is a required field, and sometimes the difficulty hides in the description of the ride. Optionally think about a ride difficulty dropdown the ride leader could select.

[carrythebanner]

Meghan has also shared some feedback on this, floating the possibility of

… adding Pace to the event description. Here's what the Cascade Bicycle Club uses for their scale:

• Easy: Under 10 mph
• Leisurely: 10-12 mph
• Steady: 12-14 mph
• Moderate: 14-16 mph
• Brisk: 16-18 mph
• Vigorous: 18- 20 mph
• Strenuous: 20-22 mph
• Super Strenuous: 22+ mph

(See https://cascade.org/rides-free-group-rides/ride-classifications)

I like that they're already defined and some folks may find that scale specifically to be familiar, though IMO the Cascade classifications may not be a good match for city riding with traffic, frequent stops, etc. (They note that, "Pace classification indicates the intended range of speeds on level ground without breaks.")

Many Shift rides tend towards the lower end of the scale, especially during Pedalpalooza, and probably even slower than "Easy" on that scale. "Easy" is also a value/performance judgement of sorts, which may discourage riders who don't match that pace. As a contrast, TriMet's route planning tool offers biking speed options of 6, 8, 10, and 12 mph. Also, biking speed in miles per hours may be somewhat esoteric for riders who need pace info the most. i.e. Slower or less experienced rides may not know offhand how fast they usually bike / would be comfortable attempting.

An alternative would be something less exact — something like "casual / brisk / challenging." Other terms I've heard are "social" or "conversation-paced." Downside is that those are fuzzy terms with a range of interpretations. One person's "social" pace is another's "unbearably slow" or possibly "leaving me behind."

Getting a range of opinions for how to best capture this would be great, especially from folks who have been reluctant to attend events in the past because of uncertainty around pace/difficult.

[aaroncorsi]

I feel like the really specific scale above is too granular for Shift, and I agree with you that it also seems to be calibrated more towards experienced riders who would have a higher average speed. I think you're on to something with the idea that it could be boiled down into three options with no specific number value attached. After thinking about it for a moment the options that felt most appropriate to me for Shift rides were "Slow", "Casual", and "Fast".

[fool]

I love this suggestion. While this is one direction to approach helping-riders-anticipate-difficulty from, unless we make the field mandatory I bet it doesn't get a ton of use. The other direction ot approach it from is ride leader training, but that has had spotty attendance when we held sessions in the past, and folks who fill out online forms tend to click through any "read these instructions!!" pages without reading in my experience. What's the group feel (I think all of the dev stakeholders are in this thread) on making it a mandatory field going forward (with the smaller options list Aaron proposed)

On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 9:02 PM Aaron Corsi @.***> wrote:

I feel like the really specific scale above is too granular for Shift, and I agree with you that it also seems to be calibrated more towards experienced riders who would have a higher average speed. I think you're on to something with the idea that it could be boiled down into three options with no specific number value attached. After thinking about it for a moment the options that felt most appropriate to me for Shift rides were "Slow", "Casual", and "Fast".

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[aaroncorsi]

I echo the concern that an optional field would not be used enough to actually solve the problem.

As an example, I pulled rides from June 1 2023 through September 1 2023 and length was null for every single one of them. Either there is a problem with the API causing it to not send that value or the field is severely underutilized and not a single ride from Pedalpalooza 2023 told potential riders what they were in for regarding length, unless it was in the detailed description.

If we think it's an issue that people aren't going to rides because they don't understand the difficulty then we should probably figure out a way to address informing users of both length and speed, while still somehow allowing for rides where the length is unknown. In addition to the above suggestions about speed, perhaps the lowest effort option to solve both would be to add a "length unknown" option to the length dropdown and make it required as well?

[fool]

love it!

Maybe on monday we can put our heads together on the current form to make sure we don't have any other fields that we think should be mandatory or are mandatory and need not be? As someone who used to work in ecommerce, there is a well known phenomenon around "more work for the user maps directly to less conversion" (in this case, conversion would be "submitting the ride"), so I want to be careful about not overburdening leaders and having them abandon from questionnaire-itis. In that past life, we literally paid visa not to have to ask for the CVV code for credit cards for as long as they would let us, since a few bucks a purchase in cost was offset by the 10+% of folks who abandoned the shopping cart when they had "one more field to fill out". But we were selling largely junkm so maybe the analogy doesn't hold perfectly...

On Thu, Jan 25, 2024 at 2:18 PM Aaron Corsi @.***> wrote:

I echo the concern that an optional field would not be used enough to actually solve the problem.

As an example, I pulled rides from June 1 2023 through September 1 2023 and length was null for every single one of them. Either there is a problem with the API causing it to not send that value or the field is severely underutilized and not a single ride from Pedalpalooza 2023 told potential riders what they were in for regarding length, unless it was in the detailed description.

If we think it's an issue that people aren't going to rides because they don't understand the difficulty then we should probably figure out a way to address informing users of both length and speed, while still somehow allowing for rides where the length is unknown. In addition to the above suggestions about speed, perhaps the lowest effort option to solve both would be to add a "length unknown" option to the length dropdown and make it required as well?

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/shift-org/shift-docs/issues/470#issuecomment-1911090573, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABX5IBDAAKDPRBX5XCZJHTYQLK47AVCNFSM6AAAAAAVTKL2TOVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSMJRGA4TANJXGM . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.***>

[carrythebanner]

As an example, I pulled rides from June 1 2023 through September 1 2023 and length was null for every single one of them. Either there is a problem with the API causing it to not send that value …

Aside: That tickles something in the back of my brain, pretty sure we're either not saving or fetching that length value properly. I filed #570 to look into that.

For possibly a better field comparison, I might use the timedetails field, i.e. where people usually write something like "Meet at 5pm, ride at 5:30pm." Almost every ride does have separate meet and ride times, but not everyone fills it out because it isn't required. (Some percentage of people probably put that info in the description rather than timedetails, just to make the data a bit muddier.)

[carrythebanner]

(Not necessarily suggesting any specific solution right here, just trying to braindump a few thoughts I've had on this.)

I like reducing the scale to as few choices as possible, though with 3 I wonder if the middle value would still get chosen for most listings whether it was accurate or not, especially if it's the default. ("Well, I'm fast but not that fast.") If the middle is too broad then there will still be ample room for misinterpretation of what it means.

Maybe something like: Slow, Casual, Medium, Fast? When I see "Fast" I think really fast like, "alley cat race," "Zoo Bomb," or "Larch Mountain Fixie Furor." But there are some clubs or leaders that like to keep a bit more pep in their step than the average beer-paced Pedalpalooza rides; something like "Medium" would give them a way to signal that it's a bit ambitious but maybe not full-on Type II (bike) fun. I also wonder if "Slow" would be used much. Even though some rides are definitely more casually-paced than others, I'm not sure if many would self-identify as "slow" outright.

Pace alone probably doesn't cover all the bases for ride difficulty. What if it's a slow-ish pace but has a few gnarly hills? I know some folks who might self-select in or out of a ride based on climbs alone. Drop/no-drop is another angle.

I'm a fan of the principle of least surprise. i.e. All other things being equal, choose a path that has the fewest surprises. Everyone might not know exactly what to expect, but this field should add into that's rarely interpreted in a surprising way.

I also think that no single term or criteria can do all the work of explaining this, even if we define our terms well. We should definitely continue to encourage folks to do things like write good descriptions, provide contact info for questions, publish routes in advance, etc.