The brief

Signal Hill hosts six trail races a year. Runners wanted live results and a map, without downloading four different apps.

The app had to work in a forest with two bars of signal and a runner’s cold hands.

What I did

I designed for gloves first: big targets, few screens, and offline maps that download the night before.

Live results update over a light connection, and the finish line screen shows a runner’s time before the announcer has read it out.

What changed

Over nine thousand runners used the app across the season, and support requests on race day fell to a handful.

The organisers now plan new races around what the app can show, which is a good sign.