Posting this as a new thread — prior discussions on Courses page usability have all been locked despite the problems persisting through 2026.
I'm not a power user with a large library of saved courses. I just tried the Courses feature for the first time, looking for a community course in my area to ride, and the discovery experience is hard out of the box.
Use case
I'm based in Los Angeles. I opened Courses on the web to find a community-created route I could ride this weekend. Almost all the markers on the map are other people's public courses — and that's where the difficulty starts.
The compounding problems
1. Map clutter at popular start zones. At any popular intersection in LA, dozens of community-course start markers stack on top of each other and become unreadable even at moderate zoom levels.
2. Zoom forces a bad tradeoff. Zoom in close enough to read individual markers near a start point I'm interested in, and the route geography goes off-screen — I can no longer see where each course actually goes. Zoom out enough to see route shape, and the map turns into a sea of overlapping markers while the sidebar list balloons to hundreds of entries.
3. List thumbnails don't show location. Sidebar previews show only the abstract shape of the route line, with no geographic context. I can't tell where a course passes through without clicking each one.
Even with the current filters (activity type, distance), as a new user I'm not able to pick a course efficiently. The barrier isn't "too many of my own courses" — it's discovery on the public catalog.
Three concrete suggestions
1. Real mini-maps in the list cards instead of abstract line shapes. A small static map tile with the route traced on geography would let me identify candidate courses by location at a glance. Highest-leverage change because it tackles discovery without any new filter UI. I haven't seen this proposed in the prior locked threads.
2. Persistent "area of interest" filter. Let users draw a rectangle on the map and save it to the profile, so the list and markers stay scoped to that area across sessions — no need to re-zoom on every visit.
3. Hide specific courses from view. Once I've reviewed a course and decided it's not for me, give me a way to remove it from my visible list and markers, persisted to the profile. After 10–20 of these, the page becomes much more navigable.
Screenshot attached: marker density at a typical LA start zone, as I see it as a first-time user on the default view.
Thanks.
