Quarq · Product Design Leader · 2024
Forty days. Twenty athletes. One world championship.
Quarq's power meters measured cycling performance with precision, but the data was locked in the device until the ride ended. The brief was to take it online in time for the IRONMAN World Championship. Forty days, 20 athletes, 104 miles, global broadcast. We shipped on time and the platform performed without a hiccup.
40 days
concept to full functionality
20 athletes
monitored across 104 miles
IRONMAN WC
debut at world championship
The problem
Quarq devices measured cycling power with precision. The data sat on the device until the rider got off the bike, which meant it was useful for analysis after the fact and useless during the ride itself. Competitive cyclists wanted to see and share their performance live. For a race like IRONMAN, the audience was bigger than the riders. Coaches calling pacing strategy. Sportscasters telling the story. Spectators trying to keep up with someone they knew on the course.
Project goals
Debut to a global IRONMAN audience. Visualization that worked for elite athletes and casual fans on a laptop. Daily-use product beyond race day. Track all three triathlon legs cleanly. Forty days, concept to ship.
Process
User interviews set the priority order. Testing surfaced the real problem fast. Reporting frequency dropped at sketchy GPS points and circuitous routing made athlete rankings jump unpredictably. Fixed it by snapping reported positions to a known set of route coordinates, which let us report accurate ascent and standings even when the raw data was noisy. The 40-day window was the design forcing function. Every decision had to earn its place against legibility at speed.
Forty days isn't a constraint. It's a clarifying agent. Every decision either serves legibility or it dies.
The design
Race view, broadcast view, daily-rider view. One platform, three audiences. The race view stripped down to essentials. Position, power, gap to next rider, leg progress. Broadcast view layered storytelling. Pre-race expectations vs current performance. Daily view turned into a personal training tool. Each view shared the same data layer, so the broadcast and the rider were never looking at different numbers.
Results
Web app debuted at IRONMAN World Championships in Hawaii. Real-time monitoring across 20 athletes and 104 miles. Flawless. Performance sustained across subsequent races globally and in daily training use after the event. The platform shipped to a deadline most teams would have negotiated.
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