The BHA have a series of products within their end-to-end service offering which underpins the entirety of British horse racing. From registering owners, trainers, breeders and horses, to judging a race, the Racing Admin System product suite covers it all.

The technology underpinning this industry was outdated and blocking any future innovation. In order to stay relevant and modern and keep up with the times, BHA knew they needed to do something about it. Working in partnership with a London tech agency, we ran a CX Discovery, Technical Discovery and Proof of Concept to first understand the current state of affairs, then define and test the future vision.

We designed a new service experience, business operation model and technical infrastructure that would unlock innovation and modernisation for the BHA. Our strategic roadmap prioritised efforts over a 3 year plan, delivering incremental value throughout the process.

Ethnographic Research

This was an ethnographic research dream project. Over the course of this project I found myself in the judges booth at a race, in the jockey locker rooms, observing jockey weigh-ins, standing with the starters as the horses leave the gates, in a stall with a champion horse taking a pee sample, in top class trainer facilities, and everything in between. As a woman who grew up riding horses, I was in love with every second of it.

We had to understand how the whole system fit together from race day operations to trainers preparing for race day to syndicate owners managing their horse, owners, and prize money. It was a complex system with a huge suite of products for every role and task, and took months to understand fully.

The highlight of our trip to the races was when we were shadowing the starter and we got to stand right at the gates, watch the starter blow the whistle, the gates open, and the horses literally race off!

Heatmaps and Heuristics

During our CX Discovery, we developed various user flows and heat maps to visually communicate how all the intricate systems connected, how each role interacted with another, and where the big problems were. We evaluated every product along the service journey using a combination of heuristics to help bring to life and later prioritise the roadmap.

Proof of Concept

Working in a product team for 3 months we developed a working proof of concept of our new vision. This included a service blueprint as well as a working-code prototype hooked up to the real data of one of the products. We designed, tested and built a new racing admin for trainers, secretaries and owners to register horses in a race on race day; “Ents and Decs”. This was the most complicated design challenge to crack, and also the most challenging to decouple technically from the rest of the database.

We needed to test our strategy and vision to ensure it was actually feasible, viable, and desirable. We also needed to prove that working agile would be feasible and an improved way of working, in collaboration across many different teams and organisations. You can imagine how excited the entire team was by the end of this engagement when we saw our concept fully functioning. It was a success! And our stakeholders had enough to drum up funding to unlock the future of British horse racing.

The biggest challenge we faced as part of this engagement was the lack of technical and UX literacy within the organisation. This was as much a digital transformation piece of work culturally as it was technically. Using the literacy framework, we helped upskill the would-be internal product team in Agile, design-thinking and UCD methodologies. Working embedded at their offices as part of their team helped us overcome some of the cultural challenges that come with change. We wanted our stakeholders to be a success beyond our engagement – ultimately in the long run we wanted to make ourselves redundant so they could stand on their own two feet.