Sprinting a refreshed website over the finish line in time for the Olympic Games
After collaborating on a successful site launch in 2020, USA Track & Field, the National Governing Body for track and field, long-distance running and race walking in the United States, tasked the thunder::tech team with refreshing their homepage - just in time for the 2020 Olympics happening in the summer of 2021. On the front end, they challenged our team to improve the existing design for a richer style and user experience, especially on the homepage. After being delayed a year by COVID, USATF wanted to make sure the site could withstand the much-anticipated event’s web traffic. They asked the t::team to take steps to ensure it would remain fully operational during high-traffic events.
The thunder::tech Development Team got to work on brainstorming solutions for both pieces of USATF’s request. After researching and reviewing the current site, our design team brought USATF’s concept for a medal tracker to life, in addition to athlete bios on the website to help fans keep up with their favorite events and athletes during the Games. On the back end, we executed load-testing scenarios using data from past Trials and global Olympics broadcasts to determine the site could handle 15,000-20,000 requests per minute. We then considered challenges around the uncertainty of multi-day events taking place throughout time zones, especially the Olympic Trials. Through further testing, we identified points of failure and corrected them until we felt confident in the load-balanced, multi-server architecture of the site.
Our Digital Support and SysOps teams stood at the ready, monitoring the site to react immediately to any issues that could arise. But, for the first time in USATF history, their site did not go down during the entire Olympic Trials event. It successfully hosted more than 7 million unique user sessions over the course of three days. After the Trials, the medal tracker and athlete bios proved to be useful tools USATF could easily translate to other aspects of the site and future events. We continue to make improvements and iterate on the site today as we gear up for Paris!
thunder::tech's Development Team is ready to help your site go for the gold!