Would love to hear more about this process with SportStats including the planning and feedback from users in developing this new display system. I applaud the move to a mobile app, but it just doesn’t work for me as it stands. I talked a little bit about this briefly last week in another thread in having to go directly to SportsStats to see what I wanted.
The Bad
On the desktop you load the old athlete tracker, which briefly flashes, then takes another 5 to 10 seconds to load an entirely different process over the top which takes away the old tracker and presents the user with a question regarding “are you a participant” which they must click yes or no to. Talk about increased friction.
They ask the same question over and over again when coming back “are you a participant” which based on my observation, does nothing different based on which you choose, which leads to be believe it is just data mining. Can we get an opt out of this to never ask me the question again.
Then I am taken to a confusing layout which looks like it was designed for mobile but I am on desktop. It takes way too many clicks to get the information I want. I want to see athlete name, swim, bike, run, and finish time, as you can piece together a lot of the race very quickly. I not only do this for the pro division but age-group divisions as well.
An athlete drops out and they pretty much fall off the tracker. Sure you can search by name (yesterday Tollkason) but frankly they become and after-thought. It would be great to still see them in the results somehow.
The Good
I like that you can see the segment data so you can see where everyone went thru say mile 16.2 with times. That is helpful and seems to be the way a lot of European races have been reporting for many years, but again, I just don’t know why we can’t get a simple summary of swim, bike, and run and if we want to drill down further then we can. And do it without clicking, scrolling, and further loading.
I realize my views are very much a “fan of the sport” way of viewing triathlon results, which I am sure I am in the minority. This system is probably ok for the typical person tracking a person who doesn’t care about the details, but again, it is way too slow, poorly formatted for desktop, and prompts for the same question over and over again.
I have no user experience with it but my wife and family used it for the first time at lake placid yesterday and they loved it. It made a big difference in their experience from other ironman’s I’ve done where they just used the ironman site. They said it was basically updating real time which when you are trying to move around the course to see an athlete makes a huge difference.They do however fall in the “typical person tracking a person who doesn’t care about the details” :).
Can only track people by name, and I like to see how the top people in various age groups are doing without having to type in each of their names. Thumbs down on the new tracker.
I have no user experience with it but my wife and family used it for the first time at lake placid yesterday and they loved it. It made a big difference in their experience from other ironman’s I’ve done where they just used the ironman site. They said it was basically updating real time which when you are trying to move around the course to see an athlete makes a huge difference.They do however fall in the “typical person tracking a person who doesn’t care about the details” :).
Yep exactly, I get that it is probably great for the typical person tracking their loved one. And while SportsStats commented that 81% are mobile, and the new mobile seems to be quite a bit better than before, the desktop experience blows. The fact that they made changes to the system in IMLP was great, but it also shows there is no real process here in asking users what they wanted in the system in terms of planning.
It gets back to the question, "what can we do to make people a fan of sport’, surely one way NOT to do this is to take away the things your fans like and want.
As a comparison, I have often said Apple needs to develop two operating system for iPhone, they need the “easy OS”, the current iOs that exists, and then there needs to be toggle to allow people who want a “superOS” to be able to do their own thing.
I loved it. Had two friends in IM LP and set it to alert me when they hit the markers. I thought it worked flawlessly - once I figured out how to switch from km to mi!
Can only track people by name, and I like to see how the top people in various age groups are doing without having to type in each of their names. Thumbs down on the new tracker.
It’s just about useless for me for the same reason. A good ten steps backward unless you’re just trying to track a single individual.
i cant comment on the phone page experience as i havent used it, but it seems to be very positive.
As somebody that uses 90% of the time the desktop for tracking i have to agree with what you say about desktop function
Its very frustrating currently but i assume it will get better again.
WTC needs some new front end devs. This ought to work the same on mobile and on desktop with just different CSS style sheets.
Didn’t use the new tracker yet. My use case would work fine. It’s just my GF or a Sherpa friend from the hotel room or family at home tracking me by name. I don’t use the trackers. But yeah not having more flexibility is strange, considering how easy is it to implement that. Back end, the data gathering, uplink from race site to a database, the arithmetic code, that’s hard. The front end web bits are relatively easy.
It might be good to track individuals, but it sucks when you are trying to look at overall results or results for an age group. I like being able to see the splits for the group without having to open each individual.
I have a whole bunch of acquaintances doing IMLP but I couldn’t remember who exactly. It would be very nice to be able to search for people by state or town or club. It’s a database, searching shouldn’t be limited to just name.
I have a whole bunch of acquaintances doing IMLP but I couldn’t remember who exactly. It would be very nice to be able to search for people by state or town or club. It’s a database, searching shouldn’t be limited to just name.
Yep. This person gets it. The front end functionality, what a user sees in a web browser, is trivially easy to expand beyond just searching for a name. All that data is already in a database. A few extra lines of code could let us search by AG or by bib number or by country or state or any other data field. The hard work of gathering storing and processing all that data is already complete.
The problem is that Ironman took an already existing tracking app (RTRT.me) that somebody else created and copied it. Instead of taking ideas from various sources and creating their own.
Can only track people by name, and I like to see how the top people in various age groups are doing without having to type in each of their names. Thumbs down on the new tracker.
Did you click onto “Leaderboard”? It then would take you to pro, ag men and ag women. From there you click on AG and top 50 in each showed up.
My only complaint is that you couldn’t see a complete start list and on going list for each AG. I like to see the list the night before. I also would like to see who served and penalties and who took the Kona slots (the later in the same manner which North American Sports used to display)
yes. i found it almost entirely unusable. i was able to find the name and stats for someone i wished to follow----once. then not again. and when i did find the name, it was after several steps. the former display from hitting “athlete tracker” worked for me. this one did not.
peggy
Can only track people by name, and I like to see how the top people in various age groups are doing without having to type in each of their names. Thumbs down on the new tracker.
Others have pointed out the Leaderboard feature. It even gave position changes up or down within the age group from the prior split. You could go back and look at prior splits to see how fast someone was gaining on another.
It’s not made by Sportstats though. It’s a white-labeled version of RTRT (http://rtrt.me).
Needs some smoothing out on the front end dev side and a serious makeover, with serious user experience considerations.
Right I get that basically it is taking a platform for design and presentation over the sportstats data but they choose the wrong platform or they need to work with RTRT more so they can customize what is needed based on the needs of triathlon. I have seen this package through other triathlon websites and races, and it has been horrible for triathlon presentation. It is clear it was designed with a single timed element like the finish time of 10k, 5k, cycling race, marathon, etc but not for a sport like Triathlon with intermediate splits that really tell a story, ie (swim, bike, and run). I believe Lifetime used this same system in the past and it annoyed me to know end that I would have to click on each person to see their swim time, then close the window, pop open another window for the next competitor and see their swim time and so on.
I know the changes can be made and frankly it isn’t a lot of work to do one-off design. If they want to incorporate the one-offs into an actual update to the software package maybe that is more work and red tape. Maybe the functionality does exist already and sportstats, which appear to be responsible for system based on posts here, hasn’t implemented those features. But again it begs the question, why is the step of asking your users what they want missing. Just seems like there is very little planning going on here.
