Overview

WIMIA was built to solve a recurring pain point for clinics and events: travel details were scattered across PDFs, chats, and email threads. Coaches, athletes, and admins needed a single source, with clear schedules and proactive notifications.

Challenge

Manual itinerary management created duplicated effort and late updates. The core challenge was to reduce operational overhead for admins while giving athletes a fast, reliable way to access their own travel information.

Outcome

The result is a responsive web app where admins can compose event itineraries, attach schedules, and send automated reminders. Athletes receive simplified, personalized views of where to be and when — no hunting through messages.

Role & Timeline

Process

1. Research & Discovery

• Interviewed event admins and coaches to map workflows and friction points.
• Competitive scan across TeamSnap, spreadsheets, and calendar tools.
• Pain themes: fragmented comms, stale PDFs, no reminders.

2. Define

• Personas for Admin and Athlete.
• Journey: planning → distribution → event-day execution.
• Focus: deliver the right information at the right time with minimal input burden.

3. Ideate & Wireframe

• Flows for creating events & viewing schedules.
• Low-fi screens to test navigation, labels, grouping.
• Converged IA: Events → Event Days → Assignments.

4. Prototype

• Responsive UI with clear hierarchy and contrast.
• Components for event days, flights, rentals, coaches, files.
• Automated email reminders tied to event times.

5. Test & Iterate

• Usability tests revealed form fatigue and confusion.
• Optimized dashboard for next event actions.
• Chunked forms into logical sections.

Final Design

• Admin Dashboard: Central hub for events & readiness.
• Automated Reminders: Emails tied to travel and event start.
• Athlete View: Personalized, mobile-friendly itinerary.
• Responsive: Works across all devices.

Engineering

WIMIA is a Django-based web app with pragmatic architecture, prioritizing reliability, iteration speed, and maintainability.

Client: Responsive UI → Django views → ORM → SQLite/Postgres
Integrations: Gmail OAuth, file uploads
Observability: Admin metrics, error toasts

Key Learnings

• Designing for power vs. casual users requires different defaults.
• Automation is as much UX as engineering: reminders reduce cognitive load.
• Small label/hierarchy tweaks produced big clarity gains.

Impact

WIMIA consolidates itineraries, removes manual comms, and gets athletes the right info faster. Admins save hours; athletes trust their schedules.

What’s Next

• Instrumentation for task metrics.
• Move to Postgres + task queue for email scaling.
• Public sharing links with expiry and auditing.