01 · UX & Product Design · Engineering
Designing a real-time race tracking experience for one of the world's largest rowing events — serving 12,000+ athletes and 400,000+ spectators across Boston's Charles River.
400K+
Spectators at the world's largest
two-day rowing regatta
12K+
Athletes across ~2,000 boats
and 60+ events
60+
Years of HOCR history —
founded 1965
Background
The Head of the Charles Regatta is the world's premier three-day rowing event, held annually in October on Boston's Charles River. Since 1965, it has drawn hundreds of thousands of spectators to the banks — but following an actual race has always been hard.
HOCR uses a head racing format: a time trial where boats launch in staggered intervals over a 3-mile course. There's no side-by-side racing. A spectator on the riverbank can see only a sliver of the course at a time, and has no way to know who's actually winning.
"You can't tell who's winning just by watching."
LiveTrack — developed in partnership between HOCR and RegattaCentral — was built to solve this. It combines real-time GPS boat tracking with live, on-the-water video from select boats, giving spectators a way to follow any crew from start to finish, whether they're on the banks or watching from around the world.
The Problem
The race generates enormous amounts of position and timing data. The challenge wasn't capturing it — it was making it legible to real people in a high-noise, outdoor, mobile environment.
Goals
Process
Before designing anything, I analyzed how head racing actually works — time trials, staggered starts, checkpoint splits, and how rankings are determined by elapsed time rather than physical position on the water.
This was the crucial reframe: the map shows where boats are, but rankings show who's actually winning. These are not the same thing. Most tracking UIs conflate them. We couldn't.
The central design question became: How might we translate complex timing data into something instantly readable?
I explored three tensions that shaped every decision:
Lo-Fi
Concepts
Major design explorations included different approaches to showing boat rankings, handling real-time updates without overwhelming users, and balancing precision with clarity.
The key shift: moved from data-heavy tables to a visual, intuitive race progression — prioritizing the narrative of the race over the completeness of the data.
V1
V2
V3
[Annotate what changed and why between each version]
The Solution
LiveTrack gives any spectator — on the riverbank or across the world — the ability to follow any crew in real time. It combines GPS position data and in-boat video into a single coherent experience, free on the HOCR App for iOS and Android.
Transformation
Impact
Learnings