My renewed interest in horse racing is partly the product of a project I’m involved in at the moment. Charles Faull, with whom I worked 20 years ago, has been building what will end up being the most comprehensive and detailed record of South Africa’s top races. Top international races will be added, once the website is operational.

I’ve been called in to work on the user experience; essentially to take this wealth of information and present it in a way that people will want to engage with it.

The users we’re most concerned with are the ones that are new to the sport. As part of my preparatory thinking I knocked together this little ‘doodle’ presentation on Prezi:

I’m working on a mobile app that will be aimed at the 2013 L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate. The challenge is to create something with which ‘newbies’ will want to engage, at the same time as conveying some of the basic science behind the result of the race.

Racecourses are jam-packed on big race days. If racing is to have any chance of staving off stagnation it desperately needs to convert some of these once-a-year-there-for-the-party visitors into fans.