I would love to see a feature where we can choose what our landing page is for CityStrides. Currently the default is CityStrides home starting with Pinned Cities, then stats, then recent activities.
It would be very helpful to have my LifeMap be the default landing page when I access CityStrides. I most frequently open CS when I’m out for a walk or run to see my map or make a route, and always toggle over which takes a few seconds.
Recognizing different users have different preferences, I’m proposing a new feature in settings that lets users customize which page on CityStrides is their default.
I have some quick thoughts on the general area of this idea…
The homepage while we’re logged in and the profile page feel like they “compete” with each other, in a way. Each page provides a portion of the total view of our info, so both are currently required to get a full view. My gut instinct is that there are two options for correcting this:
A) We should never need to visit our own profile page (outside of rare curiosity of what other people see) & that I need to improve the logged in homepage in order to achieve that.
B) There should not be a “logged-in homepage” and instead that redirects us to our profile page, which needs to be reworked to include the stats, charts, etc that appear in the logged-in homepage.
I shy away from the idea of custom homepages because of the very likely support requests that will come in when “my homepage suddenly changed and now I can’t see my stats”.
In response to your point A: I visit my profile page all the time, firstly to see the cities I’m working on and where I’m at with them, and also it provides a quick link to my most recent activities.
I too use my profile page instead of the homepage. After a quick comparison, here is what I use often on the profile page that is not on the homepage:
One click to lifemap.
List of all my cities (and the complete count so I know when I need to revisit one), not just pinned ones. I use pinning for my current focus, but I don’t exclusively run in that area. There are also cities that I need to revisit when dropping from 100% from an update. I cannot be bothered with pinning and unpinning all the time. Nor would I like to keep all my 100% cities pinned just so I can spot them on the homepage when they drop under 100%.
Besides city progress, the numbers I care about are total streets and global rank. I find these more prominent on the profile page, but that might be because I am used to it. On the homepage that area instead shows irrelevant stats such as activity count, average distance, average pace. I had not noticed it before since I never use the homepage, but the homepage shows streets completed in the last week/month, I like that number.
Opinion on exclusive things the homepage has:
I like the streets completed in last week/month.
I don’t care for the activities/avg distance/average pace. It’s something you wonder about once or twice a year, if that.
The graph is fun to play with once every few months, but it just takes up space. It isn’t providing me information I need quickly.
Seems like the LifeMap button on the profile page is broken. Just redirects me back to the profile page. Both for my own profile and other people’s profile page.
Have been testing out the new features a bit and I definitively like the new profile page. However, I must say that I find the homepage confusing and quite unnecessary. The current homepage made me at first think that my session had expired and that I needed to log in anew. This is mainly caused by the contents of the page, asking me to “Get Running”, “Connect your account” and “Start your journey”. Moreover, there is no real reason for me (or anyone else that have used CityStrides for a little bit) to look at this page, as it is simply an introduction to what CityStrides is and its features (somewhat of a sales pitch, which is reasonable to get people to use the product). Thus, I do not have any reason to visit the homepage. Thus, I think that it would be much more useful if the homepage was a redirect to the profile page.
One idea (requires some time to work on) would be to make the homepage a tutorial page, introducing new users to the different features of CityStrides and how they can be used. Potentially with a separate part with Supporter features. This would probably be more useful to new users, and potentially old users. In such a case, there should be some possibility for users to specify that they do not want to see the tutorial again (i.e., redirect to the profile or similar instead).
If I may – I really, really, REALLY dislike the current version, my wife has the same opinion. Basically the only reason I opened the forum today is to find what happened to my normal landing page and why does it look like I’m not logged in…
Overview of the past couple of activities, pinned cities with progress, maybe map of the most recent city… that’s what I want to see. Current status and recent history at a glance.
Maybe a temporary (~few weeks) banner for logged-in users clicking the home page something like “looking for your home page? click here to go to your new profile page!” to avoid confusion
While bookmarking is a solution in some situations, it is not always an option. For example, if you save CityStrides to the home screen in iOS to make it act like an app (see Create a CityStrides app - #30 by davemorin), you are unable to change the URL that opens by default. This is the base URL, i.e., https://citystrides.com. Thus, you cannot avoid being taken to the homepage.
Obviously there are ways to avoid having to see the home page in many setups and it is “just a few clicks” to get to other pages. So it is not a major problem. I just find the design choice confusing, as I imagine it is not only me that got confused about the new home page. More so I would not think that most logged in users will actually look at this page when going to CityStrides. To illustrate the point, this choice is almost equivalent to Strava or Garmin showing a page prompting you to join their service, rather than showing you (as a logged in user) your feed or dashboard. Or if Facebook, Twitter or Instagram showed you a page aimed at getting you to join, rather than your feed and you had to click twice to see your feed.
