The new Navigator

The new version of the Crickles Navigator is now available here. Details on how to get access can be found here.

This has many significant improvements compared to the “Classic” version. Here’s a summary of the most important changes:

1. Your data now comes to Crickles through intervals.icu rather than Strava. This is the motivating change and a central one. Unlike Strava, intervals.icu recognise that you own your data.
2. New activities, updates and deletions are now processed in real time.
3. The user interface (UI) has been subtly but significantly upgraded. The sidebar, newly entitled Controls & Help, can now be hidden using the new < widget to give more space to the main chart area. On phones the Navigator is now likely to open with the sidebar hidden so if you want to read the help or use the controls to change what you’re seeing you’ll need to open the sidebar with the > which is at the top left of the screen and then close it again to return to the main display. This makes the Navigator usable on a phone in a way that it previously was not.
4. Your access credentials are more reliably cached now and there should be consistency across all major device and browser platforms.
5. All of the models for estimating heart rate intensity and cardiac stress have been updated. The most notable change will be for seasoned users whose history has been used in the training data. For you, the models are now personalised, as they will be for new consistent users over time as the models are periodically recalibrated.
6. Now that we’re off Strava, openness will be easier. This will be an ongoing project rather than a step change. A non-contentious example of how the calculations in Crickles might be documented is given here. I could do for the same for the analytics that involve mathematical models. Unlike the relatively simple example, these require some sort of background in data analysis or statistics so/and I’m interested to hear views on the user appetite for this. Please get in touch if you have thoughts on this topic.
7. Currently, there are fewer pages in the new version than in Crickles Classic. In some cases – for example X Factors – a page that was previously in Crickles, though interesting, was not necessarily relevant to the Crickles mission. There are other pages – notably Fit-Fat and Fitness Trend – that I intend to bring back once after a methodology review (how are the decay factors in fitness and fatigue calculations validated for our users?). Meanwhile, there are meaningful improvements to the pages that are in the new version as the following paragraphs show.
8. There is a new Cardiac Stress vs Peers page that perhaps better than any page till now expresses the central concept of Crickles. On it, you can see your aggregate cardiac stress over the past one to 12 months broken down into its component factors. Better still, you can see how your levels compare to age group peers.
9. This requires that Crickles knows your date of birth, which is now captured at sign up and is editable on the new Profile page. There, you can also see and edit information about any heart rhythm issues – or the fact that you’ve never had any – that you may previously have reported on the old Crickles survey. As seasoned Crickles users will know, this information is very helpful for our research and if this currently shows as Don’t know we would be grateful if you could enter whatever you can.
10. The Regularity page is not currently in the new Navigator but you can see the Regularity reading for each activity on the Timeline page where anything other than Regular is visually flagged.
11. This information is also still available on the Activities page. This has also been significantly enhanced and shows much more data, grouped into logical blocks.
12. There is a new Route maps page. For any activities where your recording device captured location data you can see a nice zoomable map of your route with a choice of map presentations. If your device also captured your heart rate during the activity your heart rate level throughout is colour coded using the Low / Moderate / High colours from the Seasonal page..