The Jukola Relay and orienteering in general have been forerunners in using online results services. Online results have been updated online for over a decade. Like the saying goes: don’t fix what’s not broken. That is why the only major changes in the system have mostly been in the servers so they can provide the services under the growing popularity.
The growing success of smartphones has however made the Jukola online service outdated in the least. For Louna-Jukola, we made some moderate improvements focusing on making the smartphone experience better. Here’s what we did.
Stretching and adapting listings
The old score lists were easiest to use on big displays. When viewing those on smart phones the text was too small to actually read anything without constantly zooming in. Now the font size and overall representation scales according to the size of the screen and a lot less zooming is required.
In the example picture can be seen how the country flags are not visible on smaller screens and how long names are cut short so that all of the score list information is available.
Search for team numbers
Probably one of the most used service during the competition is searching for your own team’s or your friend’s team’s progress in the relay. “Is Jenny already out of the woods? When do I need to be at the changeover fence?” There has been a site for every team’s progress through all of the interval stops for years now.
Navigating to this extremely popular site has been made a lot easier now. In the menu there is a special field for the team number that’ll take you straight to that team’s site.
Saving your favourites
Favourite option was added to the team sites so it is even easier to use those sites. Just select the star on the team’s site and your favourite will be saved in your browser’s memory.
Your favourites are then visible in the menu. You can remove a team from your favourites by using the trashcan icon.
Plans for the future
There are plans for automatic updates for the system using the so called WebSocket technology. This would mean that the results would be updated to the page in real time after the punching without having to refresh the page. Prototypes have been built already but the system is still somewhat incomplete, so it is not available this year.
We hope that following the Jukola Relay is even more pleasant this year, thanks to the updates in the system! However, if we managed to break the old system, please give us feedback.
