CASE STUDY 01 Pro version in development

RacingOS: modernizing a 16-year-old race operations platform

Clubspeed's karting platform is its highest-value product — and it had gone sixteen years without a significant update. Partnering with the Director of Product, I led a deadline-driven full redesign, delivered and demoed at the 2024 IAAPA trade show.

Role
Product Designer
Timeline
2024 · hard IAAPA deadline
Platform
iPad-first · desktop · displays
Outcome
Beta shipped on time

The starting line

Clubspeed serves family entertainment centers — karting venues, laser tag arenas, trampoline parks. Its core race-management product had grown organically for sixteen years into a sprawling feature set, with tools originally built for one context being stretched to cover entirely different ones.

Legacy Clubspeed interface showing a kart transponder assignment screen inside a Lasertag category
FIG 1 — The legacy platform: assigning a transponder to a kart while inside the Lasertag category. The mismatch between tool and task was everywhere.

The mandate was a full redesign of race operations with a non-negotiable deadline: a working demo at IAAPA 2024, the industry's largest trade show.

Research: venues, competitors, operators

We grounded the redesign in two streams of research. Competitive analysis mapped how rival platforms organized race operations, and interviews with several large venue operators surfaced a critical insight: the track-side reality is an iPad in an operator's hands, not a desktop in a back office. That finding made the iPad viewport our primary design target.

Competitive research screenshot from a main Clubspeed competitor
FIG 2 — Competitive research against a primary competitor's operations view.

AI-assisted exploration

Working in collaboration with the Director of Product, I used Google Stitch to rapidly generate early structural explorations, then carried promising directions into Figma through an AI-to-Figma workflow. This compressed weeks of blank-canvas ideation into days — essential with the trade show clock running.

Early RacingOS exploration generated with Google Stitch
FIG 3 — First-pass exploration in Google Stitch, co-developed with the Director of Product.
iPad wireframe of the Race Info tab, version 2 revision 1
FIG 4 — Early iPad-optimized revision of the Race Info tab, shaped by operator interviews.

The hard problem: one platform, every venue size

Karting venues vary enormously. A small track with limited throughput has fundamentally different operational needs than a high-volume mega-venue. Our first instinct — progressive disclosure that scaled the UI to the venue — backfired: the interface accumulated an excessive layer of display controls just to manage its own complexity.

With the deadline forcing a decision, we cut the knot differently: two distinct tiers. RacingOS Lite for smaller operations and RacingOS Pro for high-volume venues, each with an interface honest about what its operators actually need on race day.

Finalized RacingOS race controls screen showing the race queue, racer roster with lap times, and start/pause controls
FIG 5 — Finalized RacingOS race controls, integrated as a module into Resova, the sister brand consolidating Clubspeed's offerings. Status color semantics — red for active urgency, green for racing, amber for staging — carry meaning at a glance.
RacingOS race controls in dark mode
FIG 6 — Dark-mode treatment of race controls for low-light track environments.
Race results display screen designed for lobby and trackside screens
FIG 7 — The Race Results view, designed for lobby and track displays where guests watch standings live.

Outcome

RESULT

The RacingOS beta shipped on time and was demoed at IAAPA 2024, generating real momentum and excitement for Clubspeed's modernization story. The Pro version is currently in development, and RacingOS now lives as a module within Resova — the sister brand that will eventually encapsulate all Clubspeed offerings.

The lasting lesson: when scalability-through-disclosure starts generating its own complexity, segmenting the product can be the more honest design answer — especially when a deadline forces you to choose what each user truly needs.