Gamification
Traditional leaderboards reward only the fastest runners, leaving most athletes disengaged. For Velox's Comp Zone, I designed a ranking system that values more than raw pace: league divisions, head-to-head matchups, performance guessing, activity streaks, and consistency scoring. Giving every runner multiple ways to compete keeps motivation tied to progress, not just speed.
No reason to log in every day
Runners open a training app for two things: today's workout and the analysis afterwards. Even Strava, the category leader, sees almost an hour of activity for every 2 minutes subscribers spend in the app. Time in the app is a hard conversion.
Pace-based rankings don't help: they reward a handful of fast runners and give everyone else little reason to come back between sessions. League gives every runner that reason by using what our users already have plenty of: competitiveness.
A 1v1 league, inspired by the Premier League
A head-to-head game that scores how well you read other runners, not raw performance, so every runner has a reason to check in daily.
There are ten divisions, and everyone starts in X and climbs toward I. Each week you're in a room of four to six runners and matched against one of them. When your opponent logs a session, you call the RPE they reported: a call within 1.0 scores, and the closer you are the more it pays, while a miss by more than 1.0 costs points. Scout cards give you evidence, but every flip after the first cuts what the read pays.
Points build the table. Finish high to move up a division, low to drop down.
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