Feedback about new climb feature

[mu88]

Hey,

First of all, I really like the progress you're making with the new climb feature 🤩 as promised, here's my feedback:

Consider displaying slope in percent

Personally, it feels more natural to me to read slope in percent than in decimal. For example, here I'd write 10% instead 0.10:

Climb detection seems to be too sensitive

Here you can see the climb detection of the route I sent you last week within workout tracker:

As you can see, it contains many small and split climbs.

And here's the output of the same track from https://gpx-analyzer.streamlit.app:

That matches more with my personal impression (a smaller climb at the beginning, a second one, and a hard one at the end), whereas workout tracker's climbs don't match my memories. Actually, when seeing these climbs, I was thinking to myself Wait, where were these climbs? Wasn't it just a longer one? 😄

So long story short, the current hill climb detection seems a bit too sensitive to me.

Arrangement of UI elements

With the new climbs table, a workout detail page becomes very long - personally, I'm most interested in the details at the very top and the climbs at the very end, but I barely ever read the details per kilometer in between. Of course, that's a question of personal preferences. But maybe the overall site height could be condensed. The following ideas came to my mind:

• Use collapsible, like this for Markdown. The climb table and kilometer table would be different collapsible items and folded up by default.
• Use different panels (don't know if this is the correct name in terms of UI people), like here on GitHub:

Climb details

The following additional climb details would be neat to have in the table:

• Min slope
• Max slope
• Average slope
• Min cadence
• Max cadence
• Average cadence

Furthermore, consider renaming Climb Elevation to Elevation Gain.

Overall details

Consider adding the following data to the overview table at the very top of a workout:

• Min slope
• Max slope
• Average slope

Climb category

Call me a nerd, but I like the concept of climb categories 🤓 I did a quick search and was a bit surprised that there are no unique concepts across cycling competitions - Tour de France does it differently than Giro d'Italia, etc. There is even a completely other concept of Cotacol Points (see here) 😲
But I stumbled over the Strava and Garmin algorithms, which seem easy enough to implement and precise enough for non-professionals like me 😄
Maybe it would be an option to implement both algorithms, and an option in the user's profile where one can choose which algorithm to use.

Slope within climb profile

I'd find it very interesting to see the color-coded slope in the elevation profile, like on https://gpx-analyzer.streamlit.app/:

UI suggestion

Just as a warning, I have absolutely no good sense for properly designed pages, my UI usually looks very crappy 😄 but nonetheless I tried to sketch what it would look like.

There are three different panels:

• Overview → contains the map and the overall details of the workout.
• Kilometers → contains the detailed per-kilometer details table.
• Climbs

The latter could look like this:

Overall statistics

| Elevation Gain | Category | Average Slope | Start Distance | Climb Distance | Start Duration | Climb Duration |
Hey,

First of all, I really like the progress you're making with the new climb feature 🤩 as promised, here's my feedback:

Consider displaying slope in percent

Personally, it feels more natural to me to read slope in percent than in decimal. For example, here I'd write 10% instead 0.10:

Climb detection seems to be too sensitive

Here you can see the climb detection of the route I sent you last week within workout tracker:

As you can see, it contains many small and split climbs.

And here's the output of the same track from https://gpx-analyzer.streamlit.app:

That matches more with my personal impression (a smaller climb at the beginning, a second one, and a hard one at the end), whereas workout tracker's climbs don't match my memories. Actually, when seeing these climbs, I was thinking to myself Wait, where were these climbs? Wasn't it just a longer one? 😄

So long story short, the current hill climb detection seems a bit too sensitive to me.

Arrangement of UI elements

With the new climbs table, a workout detail page becomes very long - personally, I'm most interested in the details at the very top and the climbs at the very end, but I barely ever read the details per kilometer in between. Of course, that's a question of personal preferences. But maybe the overall site height could be condensed. The following ideas came to my mind:

• Use collapsible, like this for Markdown. The climb table and kilometer table would be different collapsible items and folded up by default.
• Use different panels (don't know if this is the correct name in terms of UI people), like here on GitHub:

Climb details

The following additional climb details would be neat to have in the table:

• Min slope (if there's no climb details page, see my suggestion at the very bottom)
• Max slope (if there's no climb details page, see my suggestion at the very bottom)
• Average slope
• Min cadence (if there's no climb details page, see my suggestion at the very bottom)
• Max cadence (if there's no climb details page, see my suggestion at the very bottom)
• Average cadence
• Average speed

Furthermore, consider renaming Climb Elevation to Elevation Gain.

Overall details

Consider adding the following data to the overview table at the very top of a workout:

• Min slope
• Max slope
• Average slope

Climb category

Call me a nerd, but I like the concept of climb categories 🤓 I did a quick search and was a bit surprised that there are no unique concepts across cycling competitions - Tour de France does it differently than Giro d'Italia, etc. There is even a completely other concept of Cotacol Points (see here) 😲
But I stumbled over the Strava and Garmin algorithms, which seem easy enough to implement and precise enough for non-professionals like me 😄
Maybe it would be an option to implement both algorithms, and an option in the user's profile where one can choose which algorithm to use.

Slope within climb profile

I'd find it very interesting to see the color-coded slope in the elevation profile, like on https://gpx-analyzer.streamlit.app/:

UI suggestion

Just as a warning, I have absolutely no good sense for properly designed pages, my UI usually looks very crappy 😄 but nonetheless I tried to sketch what it would look like.

There are three different panels:

• Overview → contains the map and the overall details of the workout.
• Kilometers → contains the detailed per-kilometer details table.
• Climbs

The latter could look like this:

Overall statistics

Climb Number	Elevation Gain	Category	Average Slope	Start Distance	Climb Distance	Start Duration	Climb Duration	Average Speed	Average Cadence
1	59 m	None	4%	0.71 km	1.18 km	2min 33s	5min 37s	11 km/h	91 spm
2	337 m	2	7.7%	2.23 km	4.3 km	9min 23s	30min	7 km/h	88 spm
3	688 m	1	6.9%	11.3 km	9.9 km	54min	61min	7 km/h	67 spm

Climb details

Climb 1

Statistics

• Elevation
  • Gain: 59 m
  • Start: 498 m
  • End: 557 m
• Slope
  • Average: 4%
  • Min: 2%
  • Max: 6%
  • Climb Category: None
• Distance
  • Length: 1,18 km
  • Start: 0.71 km
  • End: 1.89 km
• Time
  • Duration: 5min 37s
  • Start: 2min 33s
  • End: 8min 10s
• Cadence
  • Average: 81 spm
  • Min: 43 spm
  • Max: 110 spm
• Speed
  • Average: 9 km/h
  • Min: 4 km/h
  • Max: 21 km/h

Profile

Climb 2

Statistics

You get my point

Profile

You get my point

Climb 3

Statistics

You get my point

Profile

You get my point

[jovandeginste]

Thank you for your feedback! I will work on the algorithm.

Just to be clear, I will never implement a "Strava" or "Garmin" algorithm. I may implement an algorithm that may or may not happen to work very similar to one of those. But I will never look at their implementation or compare results. Too dangerous.

Regarding the UI, I implemented the minimum to have something shown, so we can improve the algorithm. Your suggestions, however, are interesting. I will play with tabs and/or collapsible items.

[jovandeginste]

I updated the algorithm; can you try this?

[mu88]

Looks way better!

However, the climb distances of Climb #1 and Climb #3 are too long: the first was a bit more than 1 km (not 2 km), and the third one was something like 9-10 km, but definitely not 14 🙂

[mu88]

@jovandeginste: just out of curiosity, could you find something about why the climb distances tend to be too long, as mentioned before? Is it related to these thresholds?

[alternativesurfer]

@mu88

Unrelated to your ticket, where on earth do I find Climb statistics?
I feel dumb.

[mu88]

@alternativesurfer: to be honest, I haven't updated the app for a while since the bike season for me is over - so I cannot speak for the very latest version. But in previous versions, it was at the bottom of the workout details page.

[alternativesurfer]

OOOoooooo

its for bicycling. Thank you!

I am into mountaineering and I saw this and was super interested in getting stats for what would be considered the "climb" part of my approaches.

Maybe @jovandeginste can build that into a new exercise profile, if they don't want to add it to the generic "Hiking" activity.

[jovandeginste]

@mu88 apologies for taking so long. I finally had a few days to dive into this, and was trying to crack this particular issue since yesterday with no luck.

There is no nice way of putting this, I was apparently comparing two different gpx files when testing my algorithm. When I realized this - and started comparing the same GPX with gpx-analyzer - suddenly I got way better results!

I will merge a PR (#704) that seems to address most of the technical details - the calculation, and part of the visualization.

If this works well enough now, I can start looking into improving the visualization.

[mu88]

@jovandeginste: thank you so much for your work, and a happy new year 🥳

I quickly gave it a try, updated my instance to ghcr.io/jovandeginste/workout-tracker:sha-b3e0dc6, deleted the old workout, and re-added it again - but now the elevation data are completely gone 🤔

Therefore, the climb data are empty, too:

[jovandeginste]

I believe I broke the update algorithm with the background pool PR ... I'm working on a fix inside another feature, waiting for tests: #713

[jovandeginste]

(and now waiting for the build ...)

[mu88]

Way better! 🤩

Just the Average Slope in the Climbs table seems to have a little percentage vs. double formatting issue 😉

[jovandeginste]

Good point; fixed it at some point, but during all the restarts, the "fix" was gone. I opened #715

[mu88]

Works like a charm