hello everyone my name is Juliano Franz i'm from dalhousie university in halifax canada
and today i'm here to talk about our work called ride with me: exploring group road cycling through
contextual design so literature tells us that sports contributes to healthier physical and
social lives furthermore group sports such as hockey group road cycling and soccer
can promote socialization as it brings people together with a common interest
with the popularization of cheaper sensors and sport gadgets like running watches
teams and athletes are collecting a large amount of data while they're exercising and this is not
limited to professional sports as individuals in the enthusiasts and recreational realms are
collecting statistics of their own activities to track maintain and even improve their performance
furthermore that information is usually uploaded to social media websites that
are focused on sports such as Strava for analysis and also to share with their peers
we observed an increase in sports related sports related research in
the hci community however there seems to be a focus on pre and post hoc analysis of
export data however there are some uh in the wild work that focus but they focus on individual
athletes rather than a group of athletes working together so for motivations we know that cyclists
collect a lot of information while they're writing either to body words sensors or bicycle worn
sensors different than for example soccer that information is available to the athletes while
they're doing exercise through small computers as well as model displays called by computers there
is also a set of uh information that is sent by the writer to their own body and it's not doesn't
exist in the virtual space and lastly we we know that writers will share that information to social
media websites such as Strava so what i'm trying to understand is how is data used to support group
work so moving away from that individual writer into a group of writers that is working together
so our goal for study was to explore this in context so explore their their attritions,
communications and behavior patterns while they're they're doing work through contextual design
however contextual increase during the covid19 pandemic uh was something that it's kind of hard
to do especially because social gatherings and group sports were cancelled during the
time frame of this study so sorry what we wanted to know is well we know that
writers are collecting a lot of information and uploading to strava so can we use that right data
to promote recall bring participants back into context and then run contextual inquiry and this
is why we call the remote contextual ranking protocol we had 12 risers from three cycling
groups in canada they had to write at least 100 kilometers without counting commuting kilometers
and they have to to ride on groups of at least three riders and this was actually much higher
than that they supplied us with five recorded rights from their strava two individual rights are
where they write wrote by themselves and we use that as training wheels for the contextual inquiry
protocol and then three group rides that were the same for all the writers in the same group
so we started with a visual interview of each athlete which created the individual work models
we then brought those athletes back to run our model validation so we talk about the
validated individual work models from that we create a consolidated group model we brought the
group back and had a validation and discussion period on that group work model and from that
we created the road cycling work models in the end so in the eventual interview it lasted for
about two hours we talk about spawn motivators we also talk about how they would interact with
their bike computerws when a different in depth analysis of how many pages how many sensors they
have which uh which data fields they currently have up um then we explore the five rides as well
after we brought them back we presented and explained um what is the information that each
work model is trying to depict we had a discussion about the work models um and we validated make
changes or confirm what we already had in the work models from that we created the consolidated group
work models brought the group back in presented the constantly work models and had a discussion
first to validate but also to identify issues that we observed in the individual work models
individual interviews for example when we had a writer saying that on this particular scenario i
was doing fine i was leading a group everyone else was doing fine and then another writer
actually mentioned something completely different thus exposing for example communication issues
the consolidated work models for group cycling are available in the acm digital library
together with the paper and we encourage everyone to take a look at them
so to talk a little bit about our findings we will refer to the paper a lot because there's
not enough time to here to talk about our findings but we split them into six actions
roles and responsibilities of each individual writer external influences when they're writing
but also when why they write their by computer how they interact with the by computer between writer
communication the work environment which is the real world and how it affects the group safety and
then finally pacing and coordination so regarding the roles we identify three roles the leading roll
the middle of the pack and then the wheel we also saw that these rolls are actually fluid so riders
will throughout a group ride experience each individual role multiple times throughout the ride
what they're going to be doing is they're going to be rotating whoever is leading from time to time
to actually manage effort we also saw that there is a higher cognitive load and mental strain in
the leader position because that person is not only responsible for pacing the group accordingly
but also for the group safety avoiding to hitting potholes or going to a ditch for example
their bike computer is their primary source of information it consists of a small screen and
because of that they need to have multiple pages in order to show all the information they need
however the bike computer only shows one's individual information and there's no sharing
of information through it writers also told us that especially in group rights interacting with
the by computer can be hazards because they're close to each other and in order to interact
with a bike computer they have to take their eyes away from the road and sometimes their hands away
from the handlebar for kind of communication there are two primary communication strategies
one is using hand gestures and that flows from the front to the back and the other is used vertical
utterances going from the back to the front however it is common for information to be dropped
from time to time and a gesture not propagating all the way to the end of people not hearing
the verbal communication their gesture lexicon is mostly consistent throughout the groups except for
the stop gesture we had which had small variations interesting enough exertion information is not
shared to using any of these two communication strategies and sometimes it makes the leader
have to guess um the current effort current exertion state of each individual writer
so talk about pacing the goal is to write together because that allows them to move faster or
longer depending on the writing they're trying to do so they use this rotating rotation
strategies of moving the leader um and there are multiple strategies we discussed in the paper um
to take someone that is tired on the front move it to the back so that can person go into active
recovery and they're going to be doing this multiple times throughout their rides however
there is no additional support on how to place the group so the leader current leader has to
find the proper pace where it's avoiding drops so nobody is getting over tax and dropping from the
group but there's also providing enough exercise team line for that particular ride so talking
about pace even though there can be a discussion on how fast writers will go the actual pace is
actually defined by the group composition as their writing so observe an interesting situation in one
of our one of our groups where they're writing for a long period of time in a place that was comfort
for everyone and they actually found the writer um on the road the writer then became part of
that group which just changed the configuration of the group and that implicitly made the change go
the base go faster and what happened there were a couple riders that were already tired
and they end up dropping from the group because they couldn't keep up with the new pace
so we believe that we want to propose a research shift we're going to moving
from individual athletes to group athletes or through the group as a whole regarding cycling
we move away from the commuter and move away from the tourist into the athlete athlete space design
so although some of the needs between commuters and athletes are similar such as road safety
others like group communication support live effort sharing and pace coordination are unique
to group road cycling furthermore road cycles have more restricted access technology and due
to their higher travel speeds they have less time to interact with technology so we know now
we understand that group site writers have a real need for collaborations however there's nothing
uh to to support them at the moment also managing group effort or the group battery is paramount to
the success of a ride and this is a good starting point for future design opportunities and the
buy computer is ubiquitous it's always there on every single rider so yes there has been research
focusing on smart helmet design smart gloves and even smart lights or projection systems for
cyclists however there's nothing there's a huge design gap in the bike computer space where it's
already present and we could be exploring it so to conclude we provide an in-depth understanding of
the collaborative work done by road cyclists and then we use that to reflect on ways the writer
could benefit from two support for real-time collaboration when they're engaged in their sport
using in our pay-per-view spacing as a starting point thank you and i'm here for any questions