TurboRebels

BRIEF

Turborebels - a petrolhead community

TurboRebels is a startup born out of passion for anything automotive: speed, adrenaline, design, performance, competition. A private investor, former professional drifter, has planned this online platform to join fans, drivers, photographers, bloggers and event organizers together for years.

Autentika is the technological partner of TurboRebels. We are responsible for delivering a comprehensive service including Product Design, implementation and maintenance of the entire system.

CHALLENGES

The challenges which we had to face while carrying out this project included:

1

Starting from scratch

A unique idea and functionality excluded the possibility to use existing solutions available elsewhere. In practice, with every module we sat down in front of a clean whiteboard, which throughout the workshop became covered with an infinite number of simple mockups.

2

Functionality with a capital F

We have enriched functional requirements of the client during multiple Product Design workshops. This resulted in a most complicated implementation project in the history of Autentika. Nough said, that a 5-person development team spent 6000 hours on implementing this system.

3

Material Design

At the time there was a lot of rumor about Material Design. Inspired by Google’s theory we decided to implement it within TurboRebels. Most probably TurboRebels was the first project implementing Material Design to such scale in Poland (the interface includes more than 110 unique sub pages).

TARGET AUDIENCE

The target audience for automotive and motorsport content is definitely a multidimensional and complex group. We decided to focus on three persona profiles which, in our opinion, present the potential:

The Fan

What connects all fans, regardless of the subject of their interest? Emotions! Feelings, which their passion gives them and attachment to the given subject.

In this case it was not very difficult - motorport is a graceful subject to present through a web outlet. Images, videos or even substantial written content, all of it sells itself. Well, perhaps it does need a little help and a proper setting.

Michał Samojlik, Product Designer

The Competitor

These are the people who live from one weekend to another, from the moment a season starts until it ends. Rallies, races, joyrides, lap times, points and rounds. Who, where, with whom, which place did they take.

Presenting sports results and a rich calendar of events is unquestionably the biggest challenge we had to face at TurboRebels.

Andrzej Miałszygrosz, Product Designer

The Author

Blogger, photographer, director, reporter, journalist. The automotive industry is present in professional media and in private online channels.

We knew that in order to encourage content creators to publish their content on TurboRebels, we have to prepare a tool which on one hand will make it as simple as possible and on the other “sells” and helps reach new viewers.

Jacob Michalski, Product Designer

9

team members

116

mockups made

6000

hours of work

30k

competitor profiles

DESIGN

We focused mainly on implementing the language of Material Design

WORTH NOTING

We are particularly proud of the following few things on TurboRebels

Feel like you’re on Facebook

The board which is the central place for all user activity, is naturally inspired by Facebook. Sometimes it simply makes no sense to try to convince users to any new approaches.

Performance

The vast amounts of data and an ambitious traffic prognosis required proper tools, including ElasticSearch (search engine), Mamcached (quick cache based no RAM), RabbitMQ (system task queue), mod_pagespeed (optimised graphics), PHP7 and solid hosting.

Data Design

Attractive theme and intuitive interface for reviewing a vast database of results is unquestionably one of the most interesting issues within this project.

“Even without any experience with large online projects, I knew that TurboRebels will be a challenge for any production team. Knowing that, I spent more time than usually required on conversations with potential providers. Today, looking back from the perspective of a working product, I have to admit that I have selected the right team which supported us on every stage, often exceeding expectations when they were not required to do so by the agreed scope of work. Such partners deserve to be praised and recommended!”

Maciek Wodziński, Chairman of the Board at Fuel Corp