As tiny a niché as it is, being able to work and design for the small world of orienteering runners is a real thrill. It’s great to be able to give attention to use cases and workflows, where user experience is rarely top priority, and try and squeeze in a little easiness.
When it needs to serve multiple use cases, even 0a simple website can quickly become something complex to navigate. When the target audience is bound together by a small, exclusive sport characterized by seasoned routines, esoteric terms, and insider communication, and split between experienced participants and beginners, individuals, and larger organizations, the challenge becomes even bigger.
Servicing both new and experienced orienteering runners, and clubs, and other organizations in Denmark, the main effort of the design was to establish good guidance for each use case and clear and simple ways to find either equipment to buy or information to work with when getting started or setting up.
Sportident equipment is highly specialized and when buying or renting equipment in big bulks for clubs and competitions it’s easy to miss something or lose orientation. To solve this, I created bold-looking order forms with lots of space, options to hide and expand on relevant areas, and keeping everything on the same page. Rather than applying an add-to-basket approach where the full overview of items and amounts is easily lost.
An additional challenge was to understand fully the workflow behind the screen. Orders are being made, and everything is packaged and sent, except for cases, where personal pick up or handover is chosen. Everything is handled by a single guy. So we needed to make his life as easy as possible. So we ended up with a solution, where simple-to-access forms are submitted and sent as emails to the manager, as full lists of what is ordered and what is not, making the fulfilment process a bit easier.
