Designing Coaching Cues to Support Engagement and Interpretation in Cycling Training

Abstract

Cyclists who train professionally or recreationally rely on coaching cues: feedback that guides an athlete toward a training goal. In professional settings, such cues can be given by professional coaches; however, most cyclists train recreationally and without a coach. For them, cycling computers and smartwatches effectively become their coach. Such systems deliver coaching cues predominantly as numeric values and textual instructions, which the rider must continuously interpret and translate into a physical correction. With the growing availability of head-up displays and smart glasses, it becomes feasible to embed coaching cues directly into the athletes’ field of view. How such cues should be designed to support both intuitive interpretation and training remains an open question.This work investigates two design parameters for visual coaching cues: Data Abstraction and Gamification Level. In a within-subject 2×2 factorial study, 37 participants completed a structured interval task on a virtual cycling track under four conditions, combining an abstract representation (a head-locked feedback dashboard) or a physical representation (colour-graded apples embedded in the rider’s trajectory) with no gamification or shallow gamification (point system with visual reward feedback). The results show that Data Abstraction was the primary driver of both performance and experience. Shallow gamification affected neither performance nor user engagement; its only significant effect was a reduction of perceived exertion. Based on these findings, this work derives design guidelines for future situated coaching cues.