CAR RALLY
Car Rally transforms a city-wide workplace tradition into an interactive experience through real-time challenges, team dashboards, and live leaderboards. I led the UI/UX and front-end development of the mobile experience, focusing on the flow, visual hierarchy, and data visibility for participants.
THE PROBLEM
Car Rally organizers had to track points manually. Teams had to record videos and submit them through Facebook Messenger or Instagram DMs to the organizers.
With hundreds of videos being sent simultaneously, organizers had to manually verify each challenge, often leading to delays, lost submissions, and overwhelming workloads. The manual process made it difficult to track progress, maintain fairness, and keep participants updated in real time.
TALKING TO PREVIOUS CAR RALLY ORGANIZERS
Past organizers managed team submissions and point tracking through overwhelming manual labor.
FRUSTRATION #1
Points were logged manually across multiple chats and spreadsheets, making it difficult to stay consistent or accurate.
FRUSTRATION #2
Dozens of video submissions arrived through DMs at once, verifying each one became time-consuming and prone to error.
FRUSTRATION #3
Teams had no clear way to see scores or progress in real time, leading to confusion, repeated questions, and reduced engagement.
FRUSTRATION #4
Each year’s event required extensive manual coordination that limited growth and scalability.
BRAINSTORMING
After identifying key frustrations from previous organizers, our team conducted an ideation session to reimagine the Car Rally experience.
Our concepts focused on automating verification, simplifying score management, and giving teams real-time visibility through dedicated modules for Challenges, Teams, Leaderboard, and Map.
The goal was to design a centralized experience that reduced organizer workload while keeping the event’s competitive energy alive.
DESIGNING
I began prototyping the dashboard interface, the central hub for both teams and organizers. The goal was to create a layout that presented the most important information, so team scores, live challenges, and event updates felt immediate, visual, and easy to digest.
ON THE DAY OF CAR RALLY
The backend didn’t deploy properly and so the app couldn’t connect to the server, and none of the live features worked. No leaderboards. No real-time verification. Nothing.
PIVOT AND MOVE ON
Instead of calling it off, we pivoted fast. Teams went back to submitting challenges manually through Instagram and Messenger, while organizers tracked points using spreadsheets and screenshots.
It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked — and the event still ran.
AFTER CAR RALLY ENDED
Our team refused to leave it broken. Over the next week, we got the backend up and running properly. Submissions finally synced, leaderboards updated automatically, and every feature that failed on launch actually worked the way it was supposed to.
POST EVENT IMPACT
Despite our “failure”, a co-worker of ours reached out to us asking us to potentially transition Car Rally concept over to something else. The platform is now being developed for the annual Grade 12 tradition “Senior Scav”, bringing gamified teamwork and live challenges to a new audience.
The upcoming launch will roll out to 3 schools with over 250 students projected to play, turning a long-standing community event into a fully digital, connected experience.
AFTER 3 MONTHS, MY HANDOFF INCLUDED:
A fully prototyped system designed and mapped on Figma.
Promotional videos and social media assets to engage the guarding community.
A functional prototype that captured the essence of Car Rally and brought it into a digital format.
WHAT I LEARNED
Learning front end development with no background knowledge is tough.
Before this project, my design workflow lived entirely in Figma. I could map out interfaces and user flows, but I had no idea how those visuals translated into code. Though I had a computer science background before design, coding was never my strong suit. Building Car Rally forced me to bridge that gap, learning React Native, Expo, and TypeScript while figuring out how to translate design intent into working interactions.
It was messy at first, broken layouts, missing assets, syntax errors everywhere. Each error turned into a small lesson. It showed me that understanding how designs are built does not only improve development, it helps you think like a sharper designer.
Learning through failure and with failure will always come with opportunity for growth.
The launch did not go as planned. The backend crashed, and everything we built went offline before anyone could use it. At first, it felt like a complete failure. That experience taught me that failing in public is part of learning how to build things that last. Even though the app never went live during the event, the prototypes and concept demos still created impact. Sharing them with my lifeguard community sparked real interest and started conversations about how it could evolve beyond one event.
That momentum later led to the project being considered for Senior Scav, the Grade 12 tradition in the area where I grew up. It reminded me that design progress is not always measured by perfect launches. Sometimes the idea resonates first, and the execution follows after.