B.A.A. Racing App 4+

When my spouse’s tracker went completely off, you can imagine how I felt. Where they hurt? Are they okay? Are they wrapped up in a medical tent right now?! So naturally I went around asking for others to try and track them. Yet on everyone’s phone, they where completely gone. It was terrifying because they have a history of some medical problems that I did not want to repeat. But they worked so hard to get to Boston, so I held on. The tracker kept glitching on and off in different places. Finally I saw them cross the finish line, exhausted but proud, but the experience did give me a scare. Just know that technical difficulties might occur. Otherwise, the app was alright.

I agree with the review that said last year’s app was better. This app tried to be and do too much, and it was seriously lacking for race day, especially if you were tracking multiple people. So many small, seemingly obvious user features were missed. For example, you could not re-order the list runners you were tracking after adding them. More importantly, the list order of tracked runners should have automatically updated as the tracked runners crossed checkpoints(aka fastest to slowest), showing up in the order you would likely see them on the course. This obviously showed correctly on the course map view, but the list view was the default and should have also shown tracked runners in chronological order. The app was also excruciatingly slow to load and reload throughout the race.

Something I’d like to see for next year: There should be a “course spectator” option where you can put in your rough location as a spectator and be notified specifically when your tracked runner(s) hits the closest checkpoint before your location. I missed seeing a few of my tracked runners because it was distracting going back and forth between checking the app notifications and cheering.

Overall I think more thought and intentional user design needs to go towards the race tracking aspect of the app and evaluating how people are using that feature since it’s the main reason people download the B.A.A. app on Marathon Monday.

Poorly organized orchestration between app & website content. In the app, a huge fraction of the content sections pull you back to the website, which pokes you in the eye on every page to download the app (which largely serves to bring you back to a website telling you to download the app). Give me the content I *want*! (Specifically: Start times for my friends who are running. I have them in the track part of the app but don’t know when they are starting.)