2022
Help commuters feel seen without spamming their followers
Early explorations scattered across the product: new commute‑specific settings, additional stats surfaces, even a “commute rollup” widget at the top of the Feed.
On paper they all sounded appealing, but they also bloated the experience and drifted away from the core pain discovered in our research: “Recording my commutes are important to me but not very interesting for everyone else.”
The Feed: Metro Polyline + Mute commutes
In early 2022, Strava introduced polyline treatments for social causes. They would be displayed in place of the default orange polyline in the Feed with a descriptive tag over the map.
Using the existing social-impact map-treatment framework, I designed a Metro-styled green polyline that only appears on activities tagged as commutes. The treatment is:
Subtle for followers: commutes still appear, but visually distinct from default map styling rather than competing with them.
Educational for athletes and planners: the “Strava Metro” label and unique map style quietly explain that this ride contributes to infrastructure planning, not just fitness stats.
Strategic for Metro: it exposes the Metro product to millions of athletes—many of whom, we’d learned in partner interviews, were already active on Strava before becoming Metro partners.
"Hi, Is there anyway to automatically hide my daily bike commute from my followers/friends feed.
I do enjoy logging them and get all the statistics but I do not like to show them all the time since they are sort of boarder line of being a real training activity and my friends has commented on that I am spamming their feed with my commute."
-Customer Support feedback
This section sits at the center of a productive contradiction: we were simultaneously trying to make commutes more visible and meaningful while also making them less intrusive in the Feed. Existing privacy controls forced an unworkable trade-off: make commutes private (losing stats and not contributing to the Metro dataset) or share them publicly (cluttering followers’ feeds with repetitive, low-engagement content).
Solving both required revisiting who we were actually designing for.
Two user groups, same problem, different motivations:
• Performance athletes who already tracked training and races but also commuted by bike—they wanted to log the miles without flooding followers with low-effort rides
• Everyday record-keepers who weren’t chasing pace or power, using Strava as a personal record keeper—proof of consistency, not competition
Making Commutes Count: CO₂ Offset Metric
“I’d love to see the amount of carbon dioxide emissions prevented from commuting by bicycle, walking, etc. It could be displayed on your activity just like calories burned (but only when “commute” is chosen). Not only could this encourage more people to choose active transportation, but I read on your Commutes on Strava page that ‘we hope to make the commuting experience on Strava more rewarding and exciting in the future.’ A win-win!”
-Support forum feature request
Bike share Point of Interest
In a subsequent hackathon, I designed a bike share point-of-interest layer surfacing 71,000+ docking stations from 600+ systems worldwide, with live inventory powered by the open General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS).
While the Metro commute treatment focused on how commutes show up in the Feed, the bike share POI work tackled a related problem in the route planner: helping city riders actually plan those commutes when they depend on shared bikes.
The challenge was creating an icon that read as “bike share” rather than “bike shop” or “bike route.” I explored dock elements, utilitarian frame shapes, and basket iconography to move away from the road-bike silhouette used elsewhere in the product. The final icon uses the established Metro green by the polyline treatment, with a simplified upright bike silhouette that testers reliably distinguished at small sizes.
Design constraints:
• Strava’s existing POI icon design system
• Legible at 16×16px on dense urban maps
• Clearly differentiated from the existing generic bike icon
The green visual language creates a deliberate semantic connection: green elements in the Strava product indicate shared mobility and infrastructure, not individual performance. As one cycling publication summarized, the feature helps riders “find a station for beginning and ending their journey”—language that echoes the origins-and-destinations logic from Metro’s B2B product, bridging both sides of the same urban mobility story.
Impact
Support Tickets
At launch, the Metro commute treatment became the third most-used of the five social-impact map designs—outperforming our expectations given the emotional pull of campaigns like Pride and Ukraine solidarity—and it generated zero support tickets.
Coverage in cycling press validated the feature as a practical utility for urban commuters, positioning Strava as a tool for everyday mobility, not just sport.
As the product evolved, other social-impact designs were consolidated into a single “social impact” activity tag with no unique map treatment. Metro’s green polyline and label remained as a standalone option in the Feed, reinforcing its role as a bridge between everyday athletes and city planners.
Together, the Metro polyline and bike share POI form a coherent commuter system: the consumer app helps individuals plan and document trips; Metro aggregates those behaviors so cities can understand and improve the infrastructure those trips depend on.
