A couple of small suggestions for the new planner…
Don’t put a dash in front of numbers, such as the delta numbers for XSS/day, TP, HIE and PP below. It makes positive numbers look negative and negative numbers unclear (have a - - preface). Maybe put an arrow in front of the number to indicate positive or negative, or put parenthesis around the delta number, or …
Put something clear between the weeks. As is (e.g., just white bar between weeks Nov. 6-12 and 13-19) it’s unclear which weeks the set of numbers belong to. Perhaps making the bar between weeks black instead of white will suffice.
The first issue is on our list. We make take a run at some icons and other graphics to help interpret rather than just numbers.
The second issue is really only something that happens when you first open the planner but I would think would be obvious after that. We had thought of various options and settled here. A user suggested we should add a way to collapse the days or the week summaries so that you only see the days or only the week summaries. That’d be a good one to add, imo.
Perhaps move the weekly summary to the final column? As it is now, it’s not clear which week the summary relates to.
Also, I can’t see an entire day/week without scrolling up and down. Try looking at your competition’s planners that let me see 2 or 3 weeks at once and let me easily drag and drop workouts.
You can zoom out your browser to see more weeks. Given the amount of information a user may want to inspect on a weekly basis, having the weekly summary day as an eighth column is insufficient. Having it in a row where you can decide what information is pertinent to you makes way more sense.
On my tablet, I had to zoom out to 50% before I could see the entire week in the planner. It looks like it switches from mobile to desktop view, as you then get the desktop menu down the left hand side. You can then pinch zoom around the page as (to my eyes at least) the text gets a bit small.
That’s a limitation of trying to display a lot of info on a small screen, rather than a UI issue.
I’m going to be a bit stubborn about urging you to think of having something more obvious to separate the weeks. It confuses me EVERY time I open the planner. The status color bar is a great addition, but it always looks to me like that’s the separator between the weeks.
First thing to try is minimize the sidebar menu by tapping the hamburger menu icon.
If that doesn’t do it you can adjust page zoom.
It’s browser dependent but Xert may have tweaked things since the initial release.
Now I can get 100% to work with the sidebar menu collapsed.
Others may find their sweet spot is in the 75-90% range.
Minimizing the toolbar allows it to display the full week at 67% zoom, rather than the previous 50%.
This is in portrait orientation.
Putting the tablet in landscape orientation allows the full week plan at 100% zoom
I think this should be solved by moving the “bar” to the right side of the calendar. It is a summary of the week, so that makes most sense to me. It is also how TrainerRoad has done it in their UI, and it looks good and is easy to understand:
tl;dr: Planner used to be one of my favorite features. Now it’s probably the thing I dislike the most.
I’ve been using it a bit more. Not having drag a drop seems like a huge loss. Now if I want to switch 2 workouts because of the weather or my schedule, I have to go into each of them and schedule. Used to take me about 3 seconds to just drag and drop.
It’s also very easy to get lost on the week, as has been pointed out.
And not having favorites to drag and drop from the side menu makes building out the schedule a lot more work.
And this view doesn’t make it very easy to see what’s going on at glance more than this week. I liked being able to see my training stars out a month, as well as being able to easily get to different weeks.
Also I took one look at it in mobile and just sighed.
I get it, maybe I’m the outlier. But the drag and drop and favorites seem like they could easily be incorporated into this. Was there a specific reason this wasn’t retained?
Removed language selector, what’s new and camera icon from the top of the screen
Removed 2x add buttons for each day
Reduced the width of each day by 14 % and added a 8th column with the week summary (and then removed the week summary at the bottom.
I guess you can still argue if the continuous training status should before the day or after the day (before or after the activities) or if additional with space is required.
Moving the stats bar to the right definitely looks better and makes the separation between the weeks much clearer. Before the training status bar looked like the separator and it was very unclear which week the stats belonged to. Moving the stats bar makes the training status a clear separator, and you just have to remember that it applies to the week above.
Having started this thread, I also want to emphasize that I think overall the new planner looks great and gives me a lot of useful information at a glance. It’s not perfect. Drag and drop should be brought back, and it would be nice to have a way to shrink things down so that you can see more than a week or two on a screen, but I’m willing to wait for those additions in exchange for the other big improvements.
We opted to use a row rather than a column since it would squeeze the information and those with narrower displays would miss out on seeing the information. The weekly information isn’t important to a lot of users so taking up that much space wasn’t what we thought is optimal.
Another thing we’ll likely add is the ability to collapse the daily info so all you have are the weekly rows and thus can compare things week to week like the previous weekly stats page.
I’d be open to moving the weekly stats bar @nnovod but then we’d have to deal with the aftermath of having moved it just as people got used to it where it is. hard to please everyone all the time…
However, I don’t think having 8 columns vs. 7 will make a big difference, so I’d still vote for moving the weekly stats bar because it greatly clarifies other parts of the display. Do it soon so people don’t get too used to the row. And if you have the option to collapse the daily info then you can display the stats as a row again so that code will not be wasted, and anyone nostalgic for seeing rows will have that option,
Am trying to fill-up the empty space in order to reduce number of row for each activity. For your consideration.
Another thought is to put XSS + number of diamond, together with the photo, e.g 1st image is XSS number + diamond, follow by the route map, then the workout graph, With that, will reduce another row.
@ridgerider2 asked me to create a version where the training status bar was moved between the date indicator and the activities: I think that makes a even better layout as it clearly shows what belongs to each day or week.
Thank you for being open to moving the weekly summary. I think you should have some responsive design here where the image sizes and font sizes are adjusted to the width available in the browser window. If the available width is less than a threshold (typically phone or portrait tablet) you will not get a calendar, but a list of activities instead.
TrainerRoad does this and it works well. The three screenshots below shows the calendar with different widths of the browser window. The graphics and text is adjusted to fit and eventually a different layout is used that fits narrower screens.
I also think they can work on reducing the space each activity will take. At least the lines for “Activity” and “Pure Endurance” should be reduced to one. I think they should keep the diamonds and XXS. Maybe they can let “Activity” go if they need to save space. My workouts are all listed as Activities anyway because I do not use the Xert app (?).
Update:
One more suggestion for the planner here. Instead of showing the colored line on the left hand size (indicating the XSS breakdown), why not remove that and instead show the colors (still proportionally) on the circle around the number of XSS? That will make it clearer that this visualization is related to the XSS. It will also save some screen real estate.
Also, then hovering the XSS circle you should also show the breakdown in Low, High and Peak XSS on the left hand side of the circle (not overlapping the circle itself). Now you have to click on the circle to show it and click somewhere else (i.e. move your mouse) to hide it again.
hard to please everyone all the time…
And if you have the option to collapse the daily info then you can display the stats as a row again so that code will not be wasted, and anyone nostalgic for seeing rows will have that option,
