
Jeff Kiesel started a couple of weeks ago to lead efforts improving the User Interface and User Experience for both participants and race directors. Jeff worked with us part time a few years ago, and we are lucky he responded to our call for a new UI/UX Developer. Bob has worked with Jeff at two other companies in the past, and can attest to Jeff’s design and technical talent and his caring for the user experience.
We are going to flip back and forth between the UI participants see and the UI that Race Directors and Timers see. The improvements will be incremental in nature, the the goal of reducing clutter and making user’s lives simpler. We will be making small improvements and releasing them quickly so we can get feedback on our directions.
Race Website Improvements
Our first set of improvements that you will see are for Race Websites. In fact, we released the start of one set of design changes with the font on the Menu Bar. We are moving away from the Sanchez font towards sans-serif fonts to clean up the UI and make it simpler to look at. The old is on the right and the new is on the left.

We also plan on deemphasizing the RunSignUp brand seen in race websites, and the gain some real estate to emphasize the race. We are going to offer a couple of options soon for the header. The default will place the top menu choices for Profile, My Races, Help and LogOut in the upper right corner something like this:

We will also offer an option to keep it at the top, but greatly reduce the size:

We will also be coming out with a second template option that will have a full-width image rather than the Facebook-like 1200 pixel width image.

That will also have a new mobile look with the image overing the whole page on initial load:

Lots more changes coming like improved table layouts, simplified long pages in the race director dashboard like Customer Questions or Add-Ons. As well as some surprises as we start to roll out the new RD Scoring and Promotion Dashboards.