Racing Digital
The British Horse Racing Association created Racing Digital with the key goal of building the next generation platform for the management of British horse racing. I was part of the design team tasked with designing the overall experience.
01. Initial research
I designed and planned the 6 week sprint with the main goal of understanding the current system, the users and the business needs. To help this I organised workshops with senior Racing Digital stakeholders to get an initial high level perspective of the problem space.
I then organised numerous interviews with SME’s from across the business to delve deeper at which point I was prepped to talk to end users and organised 25 interviews with key user personas made up of Trainers, Trainers Secretaries, Jockey’s Agents, Owners and Clerks of The Course.
Making sense of the data
After gathering a huge amount of raw data I was able to distil it by running workshops with the design team and internal business stakeholders to get a clear picture of each of the main personas and their pain points.
I was then able to use this data to inform the creation of the 5 key User Personas. Along with the personas I mapped out the end to end experience showing each of the personas and their interactions through time. The research not only highlighted the key areas for improvements but was used as a tool to help inform the overall strategy of the programme of work.
02. Tactical delivery
Pulling from the above research I was able to influence the programme's overall strategy by highlighting issues within a key functional area of the system. It was decided to redesign a core feature of the product ‘Finding Races’, an area currently underserved by the current system.
User interviews
For this initiative I needed to delve even deeper into the proble space. I planed, scripted and facilitated 15 user interviews / contextual enquries with the key personas to understand:
What pain points Trainers had with the current system
Gain a better understanding of Trainers current workflows
Gain a better understanding of how different sizes of Trainer yards worked and understand their needs.
Pain points
Through the research I was able to highlight some key pain points that needed to be addressed during the redesign which included:
No ability to plan ahead
Clunky filtering system
Disjointed workflows - trainers jumping from different system to get all the information they needed
Reliance on 3rd party apps
Ideation
I facilitated multiple co design sessions with the project team (design, engineering & business) where we:
Brainstormed multiple solutions
Refined ideas and defined a key feature set and IA
Validated ideas with the business
03. The solution
The last sprint within this initiative was the high fidelity design sprint where I designed a fully functional prototype of key workflows which we were able to test on site with Trainers.
Search
I designed an easy and intuitive system that gave Trainers the features that they really needed and that we missing from the current system, including:
Ability to see search results by horse
Save search functionality
Search by custom groups of horses
Multi views of the results (List & Calendar)
My Planner
Trainers were currently using various 3rd party systems and their own systems to help them find and plan races. I designed a system that allowed them to do it all in one place which allowed Trainers to:
Bookmark potential races
View races by horse over time
Ability to plan ahead
Easily shared with others
View the plan in multiple formats (Calendar & List)
User testing
I was able to visit Trainer’s on site at their yards and test the prototype. I tested with a total of nine participants. Key findings included:
System works well with no major usability issues
Flexible - accommodates different user preferences
New features were well received
