FinishMyRace

Goals
FinishMyRace’s goals were to increase runner participation, help last-minute runners save money, and increase revenue for the event organizers. For FinishMyRace to meet these goals, it would need to be a well-designed application with a favorable user experience.
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Research
I created a comprehensive literature review to find out more about the problems FinishMyRace aims to solve. This review suggested that people in the United States have a lower level of fitness today than in the past, and that different age groups experience different barriers to participating in physical activity. It also incorporated researching existing applications to find commonality in their goals and observed how they meet those goals. While there are no existing applications that serve the same function as FinishMyRace, some existing ones aim to solve similar problems or take a similar approach to solve different problems. A user needs analysis was conducted to further research users' needs, motivations, and goals. The UNA included personas, interviews, and conclusions from those interviews. It found that people need to have flexibility when signing up for events and know they are spending their money wisely. Their motivations are to improve their fitness, work towards a charitable cause, and achieve a feeling of success. Interviewees considered time, location, distance, and cost as the most important factors when signing up for a run, and aspects such as running conditions, expected weather, and sponsors are secondary factors.
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Implementation
The final prototype shows how users can sign on or create their accounts, post their slots, find posted slots and other users, and make changes to their accounts. It was made with Figma and used stock images from Pexels.com as well as a few assets from generous Figma community members. FinishMyRace would reduce the risk that people take when signing up for events because they know their slots will not go to waste. It also offers people greater flexibility when signing up for events because they can sign up close to an event’s date without paying a premium. At the same time, organizers will increase their revenue because a cut of each slot’s cost will go towards them.

Challenges
There were no existing applications that served a similar purpose to FinishMyRace, so I had to analyze applications in different sectors to determine how users complete certain tasks. Also, because of my limited coding skills, I sorted search results by date, distance, etc. instead of incorporating filters.

What I learned
While I was conducting my research, I found out about some differences between user demographics and about similarities between e-commerce applications in different market sectors. While building the final prototype of the app, I learned about some of Figma's features so that I could optimize its presentation.