Talking to runners about running

Nina and Ellis have been talking with some of our early users - and others considering Byrd - to better understand their experiences, motivations and barriers. We’re big fans of observational data here, seeing how people are actually engaging with software is invaluable to make it better. But there’s still an important space for long-form conversations with people to better understand the ‘why’ that’s driving that behaviour.

There’s several posts that could be written about the fascinating things we’re learning but I wanted to pull out three positive comments that really motivated us here at Byrd this week

• “This is the first time I’ve seen a running product that actually looks like it belongs in my world and I belong in it.’
• “Always trying to be your best self is exhausting, I love that Byrd gives you permission to be kind to yourself too.”
• “It feels alive, like it’s living and breathing alongside me. It’s got my back.”

We’re always looking for new people to talk to about their experiences around running, whether positive, negative or indifferent. If you’re interested in being involved in future conversations drop Nina a line with your details.

To the bugs

There’s been a number of stability fixes this week that you can read about over at As always there are the full release notes here. These were the two critical ones that were causing the most pain for folks.

In-app notifications

There’s been an in-app notification when a run’s been imported that has driven everyone a little mad. There’s been a few fixes thrown at it, but that was just creating ever more compounding issues. For now, we’ve just removed it, and with the homepage states (see the features below) being extended we may never need to re-introduce it.

The full-menu of activities

We had a report that there was a rest day, off day and run all planned for the same day. Deeply confusing! It was one of those classic swiss-cheese issues where every problem lined up perfectly to create the issue. We’ve now put in some additional checks to make it vanishingly unlikely that it’ll ever happen again. It’s given us the impetus to start thinking about how we can make the generator more atomic to make it completely impossible rather simply incredibly unlikely.

And the new features

This week we’ve spent quite a lot of time working on solving longer term user problems but have tried to take a small batch approach to get some of them in.

Homepage as the hub

One of the things that caught us by surprise was how effective the interactions with the guide have proven on the homepage. We can see both from the logs and talking to people that there’s a lot of interaction happening there. We added it as something of an experiment just before launch. This week Toby has been building out different ‘states’ of the homepage for when you’ve recorded or run, or whilst a run is being processed by the database.

We’re really excited about where we can go with this and have lots of cool plans for the coming weeks to build it out further.

Time zone awareness

Somewhere between ‘feature’ and ‘bug’. We’re now no longer centred on Greenwich Mean Time. Well, specifically we’re not centred on UTC, it’s just that the two times happen to be the same over the winter in the UK. This should hopefully mean our users who we’ve heard from in India, Australia and Canada when we’re calculating the titles for runs.

As always there are the full release notes here