I commute to work by bicycle. As such I am a casual user of the cycling activity. But it would still be nice to see my time every day and how that progresses over time. As it is, there is usually a delay between my starting the cycling activity on my watch and actually starting to cycle, and likewise at the end. I often don't even end the activity at all. This makes the statistics fairly useless. And sometimes I stop part way through to go to a shop, which also messes with the stats.
It _is_ possible to trim the start and end of an activity. But it's hardly quick. The manual describes specifies ten steps and adding digging out my phone, unlocking, starting the app and waiting for spinners in the app it takes approximately two minutes to do, in practice. See https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=y6fK2dqAd34u9R5x54cxH8 Two minutes is awfully long for every day that I cycle. It would be nice if it just gave sensible stats by default.
One option would be to have automatic trimming on demand. Something like this:
- Start activity on the watch when I leave the house.
- When I have stopped cycling for at least half an hour (e.g. moving at under 10 Km/h with no significant vertical velocity seems a pretty safe metric) the watch could ask whether I want to stop & auto-trim the activity.
- If approved, the watch trims the start, end and any fairly stationary bits in the middle.
That would reduce two minutes of faffing with the watch to just start (3 presses) and later stop (one tap). The last tap could even be skipped and just auto-trim by default, if the user doesn't interact with the watch or react to the prompt. And suddenly the stats would be meaningful by default.
Another approach that could help is to take the median speed instead of the mean. The median is better than the mean when it comes to reducing the effect of extreme values. My cycle takes about half an hour each way and fairly flat, so even if I spend 5 minutes at the ends locking up my bicycle etc, the median is going to reflect my speed pretty well. For cyclists with a hillier ride the median would still be helpful but the 5 minutes might hurt a bit more. This is why I think that auto-trimming would help more.
What do you think?
