Gogorace Event Responsive Site – Research, Branding, UX and UI Design
The Gogorace concept was a brand new platform for sporting event search.
During the branding phase of the Gogorace project we also synthesised the upcoming requirements that the site would need when we tackled the UX and UI Design. We framed the design strategy and identified the challenges around: the publishing business objectives, publishing content creators, and event creators, of one-off events, multi-events, repeat events, annual events; and of course the event participants themselves which include; first timers, repeat users, power users, and team coordinators.
The site had to cater to this wide variety of user groups and personas, as well as allow for the future scenarios that were likely to happen as the site grew in functionality and geographic coverage during the next phases, as business goals and opportunities would naturally adjust to these new challenges.
My role started with researching global sporting events from participant research and event discovery, to booking and ticket purchasing, sharing, event promotion and management, participant team formations and so on. It’s a messy complex industry with so many variables and no decent standard for anyone involved – which presented a fantastic opportunity for GoGoRace to become that standard and develop into a global platform.
Userflows for phase 1 of Gogorace
Showing the wireframe for the Event Creators Profile Screen
The Art Direction of the site takes into account the priorities of beautiful professional photography and ease of reading – particularly around quick scanning of pages for key words, locations, dates and prices. It also took into account the publishing heritage of Citrus Media with attention on clear typographic hierarchies and white space to ensure the site did not become overburdened and cluttered, which is the current trend of event sport pages. I conducted a lot of research of event sites around the world and saw the great opportunity that the Gogorace presented – not just as a business case, but also to fulfil a real need to offer sporting event organisers and participants a solid platform to engage with.
Simple, elegant, gender neutral, contemporary, with a nod to cycling in the ‘gogo’ part of the logo.
There are a number of difficult complexities with event pages as there’s numerous ticketing structures and ticketing periods and special offers – like group purchasing and early bird prices. Not to mention multiple types of races within a single event. The UX and UI had to take all of this into account and present back a very clear dialogue between event organisers and event participants – all within a responsive environment.
Taking advantage of beautiful sporting photography
The user experience remains elegant across devices and the interface retains that refreshing aesthetic with the use of bold colours and focus on clear typographic values.
This project did hit an unfortunate challenge which provided hard learnings. This was the most complex project being developed by an overseas development house that I had been involved in. The client was very happy with my clear processes, and their involvement in those processes, as well as the final UX and UI designs. But what may be either cultural, or that particular firm’s culture, the differences between what was acceptable for the outsourced development company, and our needs and expectations was very far apart.
It was an incredibly stressful process, having to rely on people who perhaps did not value attention to fine detail, or pixel perfect precision. What was a glaring failure and unacceptable to me, was for them, passable. It got to the stage where the client pulled the overseas firm and brought the development back to a local company, who started the development from scratch, and efficiently and successfully completed the development as per the designs.
The lure of cheap overseas development may work very well in some cases, but for complex projects, as in this instance, this just simply failed. Thankfully the local development was able to bring the project to a successful launch.