Teams and Groups are becoming an increasingly popular way to attract participants. However, there are always questions about how to make this as simple and obvious as possible to attract the most people. On Monday, August 6, we are taking another step forward as part of our User Experience Manifesto to help races maximize the potential from teams and make things very simple for participants.
Previously, we had team joining bundled in with the first step of entering registration like name, address, age, gender as well as selecting an event (5K or Half Marathon for example). This has created confusion and slowed the registration process. Starting on Monday we will break teams and groups into their own separate step.
As you can see from the above the options are very clear. In this case, the “No Team option is not available since Bob is signing up for a Relay Team. As a more complicated example below, you can see there are two people being registered. When Bob selects to join an existing team, he picks a team and that team’s details are shown. Elisabeth can then simply select to join the same team as Bob. All of the options are dynamic and very fast and intuitive.
We have also added (by default) a checkbox on the first page of registration that will skip the join a team page. You can turn this off, so it would go thru the question to join a team for each participant (which many races prefer to get the viral adoption).
Also note that if you have pages on your own website that point to the registration path, there is a URL that will skip the “Join a Team” step.
Over the coming weeks, we will add several options for group and team display, much like we offer options to highlight events. This will give races a lot of flexibility to maximize the viral social promotion aspects of teams.