article by Andy Orton
The Big Picture
For four weeks every year, the TT Marshals’ Association mobilises thousands of volunteers to provide vital support around the world-famous TT Mountain course.
The Course is 37.72 miles long, includes more than 200 corners and requires more than 500 marshals for every practice and race session.
When you're dealing with an event where racing speeds can exceed 200mph, the bottom line is this: If marshals are not in the right place at the right time, racing halts.
Challenge #1
How do you position and manage thousands of volunteer marshals around a 37.72-mile course over a period of 14 days?
First, we must understand the old way
- Time consuming rotas (key man dependency)
- Locally stored database and no shared database (two separate systems, one for marshals and one for office staff)
Then we need to wireframe a new way
Wireframing is a method we use to think and start to layout how users could interact with screens. It’s the first primal attempt at delivering a potential solution. Wireframes ignore colours, design, graphics and presentation, making it faster to put something together quickly and easy to change.
Making it hi-fidelity
Once the wireframes are fully constructed, it’s time to think about how it will actually look and start to turn the wireframes into deep interactive experiences.
It had to be thumb-friendly
Marshals will access the portals on their mobile devices, tablets and desktops, the interface needs to be responsive, uncluttered, thumb-friendly, simple to use and easy to navigate for all end users, regardless of their device.
Over 60% of web traffic is cross device now
It had to be always up
The system can simply not go down, using Amazon Web Services we installed an auto scaling system which gets bigger in peak periods and contracts when the traffic is quieter, resulting in 100% uptime and lower hosting costs.
It had to be secure
For systems that carry personal data and in respect to GDPR, the data controller has to ensure systems are continuously security tested, our solution included code scanning, firewalls and privacy by design.
GDPR requires your websites to be tested for vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis? Over 83% of websites are currently insecure.
Challenge #2
How do you improve vital communications between marshalls around a road racing course that is 37.72 miles long?
Email and SMS with conditional triggers
Through the portal we enabled trigger-conditioned email and SMS, enabling Chief Sector Marshals and Deputy Sector marshals to keep all stakeholders informed with individual or mass digital communications.
Emails and SMS can be automated based on conditional scenarios of user activity.
Challenge #3
How do you attract new volunteers throughout the year while retaining your experienced marshals?
Website Revamp
Our website revamp brought real, human centric photography and informative articles to the association’s 'shop window'. It was designed to be very people focused and show how enjoyable the races can be when you’re closer to the action.
It would fuel more interest while instilling a sense of pride in established marshals. The rebranding also ensured consistency in all external communications with new volunteers.
Challenge #4
How do you coordinate training and maintain records for more than 6,500 volunteers every year?
E-learning Platform
Using a deep integration with its Leaning, our portal was developed to allow each marshal to update and manage their own training schedule, record training history and provide audit records to the organisation.
