Beezwax evolved membership and event registration, upgraded the homepage, and engineered better FileMaker workflows and web integration for USASA.

The Background

As the largest snowboard and freeski community in the world, USASA relies on web and database technologies to support member services and internal operations, as well as manage competition data and logistics. With over 5,000 members, USASA Regional Series host over 500 competitive events per year across the country for participants aged 5 to 75.

USASA selected Beezwax in 2016 to help evaluate and support the use of technology within their organization. They had a custom-built scoring and tabulation system that handled complex business-logic for their event and membership data. A significant web presence required extensive data integration between database and CMS-backed website. But operational costs were burdensome, the organization wanted to implement membership changes, and the website wasn’t optimized for their growing online user-base.

The Beezwax Solution

Beezwax evaluated a substantial wish-list and addressed urgent issues before the new season started. We then established an agile process to handle system defects and operational needs during the course of the season. Developers tackled various issues during the first year, eliminating technical debt where possible, and re-architecting portions the FileMaker-web integration. We introduced code review, pre-production environments, code change management, and other development best practices to improve system and development quality. In two years, we've reduced the web codebase by 66% while adding major new features.

The Success Story

After stabilizing the system in the first year, USASA focused on improving their website experience in the second year. Beezwax developed a new homepage with responsive design including brochure-view that highlights the USASA mission. We brought modern UI and UX to make membership registration and renewal more visually appealing and easier for users.

We built an updated regional map to showcase their national presence. We simplified navigation, providing better focus for key content while still promoting sponsors. High-traffic web and database functionality was completely refactored and provided with responsive interfaces to improve user-experience. Combined, these updates allowed USASA to achieve their goal of embracing their mobile users, improved marketing and social media exposure, and streamlined the user experience.

Web updates were complemented by database improvements. We simplified operational activities including offline/online usage, complex data-sync, tabulation and result-publishing. We automated previously manual tasks such as assigning bib number to competitors at the National Championships, and provided analytics of members' National Championships event registrations. We also reviewed existing code with an eye to improve performance and data integrity across the board. And as with the web code, we provided structured release-planning to handle updates more reliably.

Other major features we developed include intricate compliance workflows and upgraded event registration. We’re thrilled to be partners with USASA as they pursue their mission to promote Excellence, Respect and Fun for the largest snowboard and freeski community in the world.