Running Management Application

How can you use software to provide a better experience for runners?

The Challenge

With over 500 running events taking place in the US each week, a major challenge for race organizers is getting runners, especially first-time runners to run a particular race again. And this can be only be achieved if each runner has an overall positive experience during a race. There are multiple race management software for organizers, and Bazusports(merged with Chronotrack) provides one of the most popular running management applications.

Our directive was to use software to improve the user experience so there are more repeat runners for these events.

Our Approach

Given the challenge, our first goal was to figure out the parts of the running experience that could benefit the most from software automation. To achieve this, we spoke to several runners about their experiences leading up to race day, on race day, and post-race. This research revealed that most runners attend races for camaraderie. And so being able to interact with other runners and share their experiences is one of the most important reasons they run the races. Reliving those experiences via photos and videos was of great value to them. We decided to streamline the application to test this hypothesis by focusing on the media sharing aspect of the application.

To do this, we came up with a design for a web application that could gather all the media files from the photographers on-site in almost real-time, process those photos based on bib numbers, and have them accessible to the runners instantly. A hybrid mobile application was also designed.

The Results

With our help, Bazusports were able to deploy this application to thousands of runners that improved the race experience for them. At each of the races the application was deployed in, we achieved an average 41% retention rate for first-time event runners.

• Category:
  Web, CMS