Year
2024
Website
Role
Led the design of MUOV’s Free Ride experience, integrating it seamlessly into the existing product ecosystem. Delivered a cohesive end-to-end experience in close collaboration with engineering.
MUOV builds advanced indoor bikes that simulate outdoor riding through tilting, steering, electronic shifting, and virtual braking.
This project focused on introducing “Free Ride” a mode that removes predefined courses and immersive environments, allowing riders to focus purely on their performance data .No 3D environment. Just performance.
MUOV builds advanced indoor bikes that simulate outdoor riding through tilting, steering, electronic shifting, and virtual braking.
This project focused on introducing “Free Ride” a mode that removes predefined courses and immersive environments, allowing riders to focus purely on their performance data.
Considerations
While it was very important for this to move away from the existing 3D world, one of the biggest changes was to create a modular system where riders could modify the interface to showcase the metrics most relevant to them. The one aspect many current riders also asked for was to ensure that when they are in a "free ride" session that at times swiping with their hands or trying to increase metric tiles was an issue.
MUOV already had established platform flows for the existing interface. It was my tak to define how the “Free Ride” would fit into this existing ecosystem. Before any design work began, this was also very important to try and get buy in from stakeholder and engineers. We could easily identify potential shortfall which would need to be considered before design work began.
The wireframing process was used instead of jumping directly into high fidelity, even though we already had an established design system. This allowed for rapid ideation with a few potential directions for how the user would both define their screen metrics before they start their first free ride. The aim was to keep the UI minimal, readable at-a-glance, and easy to navigate around even with both handle on the handlebars.
Goings hands free was very imortant for riders and they didnt want to have to take thier hands off of the handle bars when navigating through metrics. The way that we tried to handle this was through adding physical buttons onto the handle bars very similar to those found on a controller. Enabling them to never need to touch the phone no matter how hot and sweat things got.
Using the feedback from both stake holders and the development team, designs were moved to high fidelity. It was important to maintain the platform’s minimal visual language. I kept components intentionally reusable to reduce engineering overhead and avoid bloating the system with one-off patterns. For the MVP we created 6 key metrics both as minimal and detailed panels for users to define. We also looked at how to create intial templates of the most popular setups.
This project came with a number of challanges as the team was spread all over the globe, stakeholders in London, development partners in Thailand and design in South Africa. This caused a number of times where we whished we could do workshops to test ideas quickly. However, not having everyone in the room proved difficult. The other issue we had was the bias from our primary stakeholder for the project. While they were a seasoned cyclist, they often believed their view were also those of all cyclist which was often not the case. it was therefore important to that we spoke to other cyclist to build a better idea of what did and didn't work.
Learnings
Designing for movement demands restraint. Under physical strain, unnecessary complexity becomes immediately visible. This project reinforced the importance of hierarchy, composure, and real-world validation when building interfaces that operate within the constraints of the human body.
Designing for a rider is different from designing for a seated user. Screen targets, glanceability, and hand position all matter. To reduce friction, we explored using physical controls so riders can navigate without taking their hands off the bars.
Indoor cycling is intensely competitive, and athletes expect meaningful feedback. The “Free Ride” still needed to maintain this depth of metrics, progress cues, and enough context to make the ride feel purposeful even without a course or coaching layer.
