Western States Endurance Run 4+

A good first attempt

The app is a good first attempt at providing a one-stop resource for people following the race. A couple of things could have really made things better: the Live tab should go directly to the YouTube app if it’s installed in your device. The News tab should open Twitter likewise. Instead, both are just links to a browser app.

The biggest feature of this app is live runner tracking, and it seemed to be the buggiest of all:

- There is no ability to view all runners. Why?! It requires that you know the name of the person. We want to know how everyone is doing (it’s not like Chicago where you wind up with 30,000 entrants)

- There is no ability to view the runners based purely on time; the tabs are gender-separated. This feels particularly unfortunate considering three of the top 10 finishers this year were women.

- The list view isn’t reflecting runner details. For example even after all top 50 males were finished, the Men tab still shows half of them as being out on the course.

For future versions, it would be great if we could see all runners and not just favorites. Maybe an All tab could show them, with the ability to filter (by gender, age group, aid station last passed). The ability to sort would also be good (by last name, by age, by finish order). Finally, making sure the summary list updates promptly and reflects the status from the Runner Details data.

One tiny druther—the icons that indicate a drop/DNF was helpful, but showing an image of a person in a chair felt a little sad. How about simple changing to a red icon of a person standing still instead of moving?

A future feature I’d like to see is a social media component—being able to tweet or Instagram with race-specific hash tags or be able to see other people’s tagged posts. A map to the course.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for the feedback. Sorry for some of your issues, on most devices feed does open native Twitter. The YouTube integration came together right before the race and will have better integration next year.

For tracking, the app was primarily designed to let you follow the people you care about and some of the top runners. Ultralive.net provides all the slicing and dicing for the info you are describing.

As for bugs, you are really describing the challenge of providing so many splits from remote locations over a 30 hour event and the Ultralive crew does an amazing job getting that data but it isn't like a road race with timing mats and there are frequent lags or data that comes in out of sequence.

Great ideas about social. The plan is to integrate that directly in the app with the runner's page. This year we are currently adding finish line videos for everyone (currently the top 10 men and women have been added). Next year, we'll include photos and comments.