Ride With Me: Exploring Group Road Cycling Through Contextual Design

Abstract

Group sports such as cycling promote a healthy lifestyle and contribute to an active social life among individuals with a common interest. HCI research has mainly focused on supporting individual riders like commuters, young children learning to ride safely, and tourists using bikes. In this work, we present the results of a study exploring the work done by road cyclists while training together, following a Contextual Design methodology involving participants from three different cycling groups across different geographic regions. We share their strategies and challenges with group coordination and communication, and uncover a lack of support for sharing individual metrics such as effort in common tools.