Project: World Match Racing Tour
The ISAF World Match Racing Tour (WMRT) is the world’s leading professional sailing series featuring nine World Championship events across the globe with media and television highlights coverage reaching over 180 countries around the world.
With a website dating back to the early 2000’s, World Match Racing Tour was in desperate need of a refreshed digital presence. Together with IT-Partner Sigma, WMRT commissioned us to redesign and restructure the website and to advice a long term strategy aimed towards commercializing the site.
Note: The website was not developed by us. Some changes, not in line with our design proposal, have been made since the implementation of our original design.
The Tweet Race
As a response to the need of attracting more people to the website, we came up with the Tweet Race. The main idea behind the Tweet Race is to use Twitter’s basic idea of easy updates to get fans involved in the community surrounding the WMRT. By simply following WMRT and tweeting using the hashtag #wmrt, users join the race on the website and compete for prizes. Each tweet gives the user one point in the competition, though any and all tweets posted with the same four hour period will only result in one point.
On the website, users can follow the race in real time and the top ten tweeters are displayed visually on a map simulating an actual Match Race. Each user’s current score is turned into a position along a race course on the map. One point equals one step on the map.
The main advantage of this Twitter-based competition is that it encourages users to actively promote the Tour and become part of the WMRT community.
Head To Head (Skipper Comparison)
WMRT is the oldest sailing competition in the world and the vast amount of statistics, collected over the years, are a very important factor to show prominence over competing events. Statistics are generated from 2006 years tour to the current tour and include wins/losses and price money collected over the years. To visualize this data and emphasize the completive nature of WMRT we created a section for Skipper Comparison where visitors can drag and drop two skippers to a highlight field in order to compare their achievements.
