Racing Smart View

Horse racing is an exciting sport, but it has a rather steep learning curve to truly understand all of the data available and feel confident in your picks.  But not all racing fans are experts, or understand or know how to use all of the text data points thrown at them… Smart View an attempt to simplify the choosing of a solid bet based on Racing Post expertise for all fans, regardless of racing knowledge. 

THE SET UP

• My role: Director of Design / Occasional hands-on design assistance
• Company: Racing post
• Main Team: B2B UI & UX designers, user researchers, product management, B2B stakeholders, Entain clients, 3rd party development partners

B2B at Racing Post was really more B2B2C – cobranded content that leant Racing Post’s gravitas to media partners and bookmakers products for direct consumers. 

On this project, I collaborated with internal stakeholders and the UXDR team to guide this solution to be something that was effective and inclusive by stressing the need for “in person” validation of the concept overall as well as the in-store product, and to ensure it met basic levels of accessibility for the audiences we were catering to. 

How could we engage a larger, non-expert audience?

We had the expert audience already on-side, but the less expert, time-poor audience that could be most readily monetised were being left out in the cold. We needed something visual, engaging, understandable at quick glance…

THE PROCESS

Agreeing on what we were trying to achieve

Overall objective: Create a more simiplifed version of the racecard utilising easy-to-understand data-visualisation, that also provides a new metric of scoring utilising Racing Post data based on of a smaller set of crucial data points. (e.g. 6-10 instead of 20-30)

User benefits

1. Expert racing fans can register trends with horses more easily and make in-th-moment bets more confidently.
2. Time poor, less expert horse racing bettors can make more confident bet picks knowing Racing Post’s selections are based on mountains of data, but can also see what aspects a horse might struggle with in the race via the visual formats.
3. New fans to the sport get an easy way to digest key bits of horseracing data and get introduced to the Racing Post as a source ratings horses due to a wealth of data and knowledge vs bet market trends.

Execution considerations

This concept would need to be designed flexibily to live across most media and platforms Racing Post operated in including:

1. B2C digital: Apps, desktop (both data and editorial areas)
2. Print: Newspaper and physical racecards at tracks
3. B2B2C environmental digital: Interactive display, kiosks, white label data units in partner’s websites and mobile experiences, potentially gantry

Stakeholders and departments that should be involved

1. UX Design, UX research, product management development
2. Editorial, data and machine learning, B2B commericial team, B2B2C partners (e.g. bookmakers)

BUILDING FROM THE GROUND UP

Deciding the data to present to the users

This was the internal “bun fight” Racing Post is a brand that attracts die hard racing fans to work for it, and everyone has slightly different opinions on which data points are the most important for placing a bet. Add to this, one of the main stakeholders and project champions being a former Head Editor, and there was a lot of internal push and pull between expertise and user data to decide which six data points would be the most useful to visually showcase. 

What does the Smart View Score actually mean?

We wanted to present specific data points / attributes and our rating for them, to help give a visual, holistic view of the horse’s chances, but also felt we needed to give a “summary” of what all those scores meant, hence a Smart View Score. But we also needed to find a way to explain the score – what did it mean? Where is the data coming from to create that score, etc…

Endless iterations of visual formats

ROLLING IT OUT

Rolling it out in the Racing Post product and editorial ecosystem happened at different rates and iterations. The success of Smart View (sometimes called Easy View in the early days) then rolled into the digital products after some brief testing of formats in the print newspaper, starting with inlays within related editorial articles and then later the racecards within the website and app.