Tournament Management System

UX Case Study

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” — Albert Einstein

The Goal

To build a web-based bowling tournament management system for a bowling organization with the mission to replace their legacy desktop software and make their check-in process faster.

The Users

Tournament volunteers in charge of checking in bowling teams. These volunteers have limited training and are rarely tech-savvy.

The Business Need

The top priority for this organization is speed. Checking in the teams has historically been a headache to them and to the bowlers due to the technical limitations of their legacy software.

The Challenge

Checking in a bowling team is more complicated than it seems. Payments need to be collected, bowlers need to provide missing information, teams need to be able to change squads — all this over multiple event types. These capabilities exist in a very limited form in their legacy software or do not exist at all. We had to take all these rules and workflows and turn them into a very fast, intuitive web application that could be used with minimum training.

The Approach

For this project, we took the KISS approach (Keep It Simple Stupid). We limited the information displayed on the screen to be only what the users needs to see when they need to see it and used very standard interactions. We chose obvious over snazzy and prioritized performance and speed above all things.

We used our standard UX process of understanding, thinking, prototyping, testing, and building. This allowed us to keep end users and stakeholders involved in every step of the way, and the HTML/CSS/Javascript prototypes accelerated the implementation.

The Result

We built a light-weight, efficient application that allowed the volunteers to check in teams way faster and hassle-free. We were able to transform each workflow in an intuitive set of steps to minimize training.

Lessons Learned

In the consulting business, we do not always get direct access to end users. On this project we did, and it proved how important they are for the process. Involving them in every step of the way was key to success. They continuously validated that we were on the right track and opened our eyes to scenarios we had not considered. We shall continue the evangelization process with skeptical stakeholders all over the world that see it as a waste of time and money.