World Rowing

In 2020 Sotic were delighted to sign a six-year contract with World Rowing to build and continuously develop a new, ultra-functional platform, that would sit at the heart of their ambitious digital transformation project.

World Rowing were keen to create a truly integrative and dynamic user experience; a site which would both reflect and serve their userbase whilst enabling administrators and athletes to effortlessly access and manage federation and event information.

With that in mind, Sotic launched worldrowing.com in December 2020, a website that seamlessly integrates and supports multi-level, multi-national event management with a state-of-the-art live scoring solution, participant profiles, and a sophisticated ‘Google’ style search function.

As part of our research and ideation process, Sotic’s design team undertook an extensive discovery project, in which we interviewed core stakeholders, content creators and rowing fans. The key takeaways were that the average user experience of the existing site was poor, and a common pain point was the limited search function.

Through rapid prototyping and user journey mapping, Sotic’s designers developed a state of the art ‘Google style’ search functionality that returns gallery, document, news and video results from across the site, retains previous search data and allows users to filter results. This super sophisticated system means that any fan, athlete, coach or administrator can find exactly what they need in matter of seconds.

With Covid-19 limiting attendance at live events, Sotic were keen to develop a solution that allowed fans to experience all the action and drama of a regatta, but from the comfort of their own homes.

Consequently, in 2021, we launched our ambitious Live Boat Tracker, via which rowing fans can follow a race live on the World Rowing website, whilst accessing premium race data, such as speed, stroke rate and distance from leader.

This sophisticated technology uses a powerful engine to run our ingest code hundreds of times a second, ensuring that live Olympic GPS data is processed in milliseconds. Our front-end framework renders competitor positions in real-time throughout the race, and if you miss it, a replay function allows for the virtual race drama to be played back and analysed at any point once a race result has come in.

Sotic’s team are currently working on applying this technology to other sports.