Manual
Strava Year in Sport 2020
Strava Year in Sport 2020
Strava Year in Sport 2020
Since 2009, Strava has grown from an exercise-tracking app to a full-blown community, replete with complex data and passionate users from across the globe. From runners to cyclers to swimmers and everything in between, Strava users are passionate about sport and dedicated to commemorating moments of build and triumph, wherever their movement takes them. At the close of each year, Strava offers its users a chance to review their logged activity through Year in Sport, an experience-driven solely by athlete data. From marathon runners to joggers-in-place, Year in Sport celebrates the drive to get out there, get active, and be part of the forward momentum of the human spirit. With a year as unprecedented and unpredictable as 2020, building a Year in Sport experience to sum up the past twelve months was no small feat. But, as they say—athletes don’t quit.
In previous years, Strava had created both animated videos, and a static in-app experience to present year in sport. This was the first year that the team set out to create a full data-driven animated experience natively within the Strava app, giving athletes a fully immersive personalized experience that could be easily shared across social channels.
Together with Strava, we mapped out the story of the Personalized Experience and explored how data could take shape through design, ultimately conveying athletes’ data in a dynamic, celebratory format. The lively motion language works to mirror the ups and downs, starts and stops, and hard-fought achievements of 2020.
Data storyboarding
Our next focus was to present data to the Strava user in a new way. The graphic language is based on a series of modular building blocks—layered color panels, lines, dots, circles—that can fluidly adapt in animated contexts across hundreds of assets.
At the heart of Year in Sport is the personalized experience. Delivered to more than 2.5 million athletes within the Strava mobile app, the personalized experience is the ultimate trophy in an athlete’s trophy case. Our job was to make the athlete feel truly incredible—this is Strava’s gift to athletes, celebrating and memorializing their effort and achievements across a uniquely trying year.
Working in close collaboration with the Strava team, and with the animator Sander Van Dijk, we brought each data-point to life via code-driven full screen animations that presented athletes unique data in colorful, sporty animated scenes. In a year of twists and turns, we used turning, layering, and revealing to create engaging and unexpected data-reveals.
One of Strava’s unique offerings is the sheer volume of athlete data logged in the app by its users. The press report captures and distills that data in order to unpack and analyze trends across different countries, activities, and subsets of the larger Strava community. In a year like 2020, where nothing went as planned, the disruptions and resulting trends comment on an unprecedented year, and track the seemingly limitless fortitude with which athletes overcome the odds.
Throughout the community site and social media posts, the graphic system continued to celebrate key moments and data points that spoke to trends and surprises across the larger Strava athletic community throughout 2020.
