All-Star Mile Race
Racing Victoria’s vision is to focus on growing the audience and engagement of Victorian thoroughbred racing.
To boost engagement, Racing Victoria wants to launch the “All-Star Mile” as an exciting new race-day concept where racing fans and ordinary people get to vote for the horses that run in the race.
User research – User flow – Agile methodology – Responsive design – Interactive design – Guerrilla testing – Wireframe – Style guide – Prototype – Sketch – XD CC – InVision – Miro (Realtimeboard) – Jira – Principle
Racing Victoria
2018/2019
My role
We had 6 weeks to deliver our solution for a responsive website.
In a team of 2 UX designers, our work was to design the best voting experience for our target audience. We focused on the horse list, horse profile, filter feature and the voting form with a user-centered approach. From UX workshop to meeting, from user flow to sitemap, from wireframe to prototype and testing.
We collaborated daily in an agile environment with stakeholders, a scrum master, a BA, a solution architect, 3 developers, 2 test analysts, and a product manager.
Context
A NEW RACE CONCEPT TO ATTRACT PEOPLE
Racing for all! To stay relevant, sporting codes must continuously update their product to adapt to changing consumer trends and demands. Looking at the “Arima Kinen” annual horse race in Japan, Racing Victoria opted to implement a similar concept where runners are selected by public vote. Racing Victoria wanted to implement this concept for the “All-Star Mile” horse race in Automne 2019 as this race is relatively unknown outside a die-hard racing audience.
Challenge
DRIVE ENGAGEMENT
By tapping into racing fan’s passion to create a more appealing race experience, Racing Victoria will leverage a strategy to reach new audiences, as well as retain their existing ones.
How might we engage and attract a new audience to vote for the “All-Star Mile” new concept horse race?
Solution
DESIGN A SEAMLESS VOTING EXPERIENCE
The objective is to design a digital experience that leads to a positive association with racing. The aim is to drive voting and engagement through a voting strategy that limits voting to a single entry. The online public vote will remain open for 40 days, and Racing Victoria will offer $500,000 in cash to voters to attract the audience.
The voting form will have limited fields, to minimize the effort of users. We needed to capture the following:
- Name
- Postcode
- Phone
- Date of Birth
Design process
Research
MIND MAP
While in our design concept phase, after we got the brief, we built a mind map to understand and define the ideas of the product. It was a valuable collaboration “tool” to brainstorm and communicate with stakeholders and the team. It led to having a clear understanding of Racing Victoria’s goals, technical requirements and what the UX team will be focusing on to make the product works.
PERSONAS
We referred to 2 personas to help understand our users’ needs, behaviours and goals.
USER FLOW
We designed user flows to have a clear understanding of the steps a user will have to go through to submit the vote successfully.
SITEMAP
We designed a sitemap to organize the content that needs to be on the website. We used Miro (previously realtimeboard) a collaborative tool to get feedback faster from the team.
Ideation
- Concept of a mobile app event.
Our first idea was to design a mobile app event with in mind “less is more”. We ideated on a clear and straightforward solution for the users to submit their vote in a simple and fastest way. That means to have access to a catalog of horses, info about horses, choose one horse and submit their vote. About playing with people emotions about a new race concept event.
- Concept of filtering underage people to block their access to vote
We also ideate about how to avoid people under 18 years old to submit a vote. We thought about having to inform your age on the first screen as your entry key to the website.
Wireframing
We focused our research on the horse card, horse profile, the filter to find a horse, and the voting form. As we were building a responsive solution, we worked on the behavior of the design on desktop and mobile simultaneously.
High fidelity wireframes
We had to move quickly with Hi-Fi wireframes to iterate the design with stakeholders.
#1 Horse list and filter feature
#2 Horse list and filter feature
#3 Horse list and filter feature
#4 Horse list and filter feature
#5 Horse list and filter feature
Voting form
Horse profile
Prototyping
Implementing Racing Victoria's brand identity into the design
Develop a style guide
I designed a style guide to keep visual consistency throughout the website.
Usability testing
Guerrilla testing
I asked passersby to test our solution. I went to places where I could find our target race audience, like Tab and sports store. I also went to cafes and libraries to target a new audience like millennial.
I analysed all the findings using google form and presented to managers.
Reflection
What I learnt
This project has been very valuable to learn the importance of engaging end-user feedback more often into the design process, from an earlier stage than the project permitted me to do.
The interaction design for the filters and voting form features were designed in an innovative way to achieve the outcomes that the client required. The core of our UX process was the creation of a mind map, user flow, sitemap, and wireframes. Upon completion of the prototype, I undertook guerrilla testing to validate the functionality and visual design of our solution. This was also to verify that it would deliver the outcomes that Racing Victoria expected of the project through an engaging user experience for current horse racing fans, as well as to expand the existing fan base.