Human Race

A considered design approach for the UKs largest mass participation events company

The brief

Human Race came to us with an ageing website and a desire to align their digital presence to their industry status as the leading mass participation events provider in the UK.

Their current site was clunky, old, tired and way too complex. Increasing conversions on the site has been a problem for some time. The site wasn’t friendly for smaller screens and users found content overload confusing and difficult to journey through.

The key focus for this project was on increasing conversion rates to their external events booking engine. We launched an initial stripped back homepage to declutter the user journey through to events pages.

Phased development, informed and shaped by users

Working to a tight turnaround, we released an initial phase 1 site ready for the start of the mass participation events season where most bookings are taken.

We took away all of the noise from the user journey, in particular revising the navigation to be off page in its own space, and focussed on helping users find events.

Increased traffic

Within the first month of launch, Human Race achieved a 26% increase in traffic through to the events pages year on year.

Whilst conversion through to events pages had increased, we were keen to improve even further. We spent time running monitored user testing sessions, which gave us some valuable insight to how users reacted and used the new site particularly the homepage and sport landing pages.

Armed with this info we started to define new decisions around a second phase to improve UX and increase conversion further.

Test, learn and go again

We spent some time with real users who we recruited from personas and typical use cases. We set a series of tasks and observed, discussed and monitored their browsing and use of the new site, all helping to shape the next phase.The Human Race team were present and discovered some valuable insights they weren’t aware of.

A design is never finished

We revisited the design and made key decisions informed by the user insights, data and metrics we’d gathered. We added some new event tracking analytics to manage deeper understanding of conversions and the new phase has already improved both user experience and user journeys through to the bookings pages.

Alongside the design changes, we improved the CMS admin functionality to manage partners promotions and the adverts section, enabling Human Race to offer targeted and sponsored areas of the site to specific partners, increasing opportunity of income generation through their advertising revenue.

Success by Numbers

We’re working closely with Human Race and our SEO and analytics partners to continue to monitor and work together to increase traffic, and increase conversion rates through the site.

We’re also exploring phase 2 development ideas and delighted to be a close partner on the success of Human Race into their 26th year!