Cascade Bicycle Club
A fresh redesign and modernized custom event registration, membership, and fundraising platform.
Starting with an Upgrade
In 2015, we partnered with the Cascade Bicycle Club [CBC] to build an event registration and membership system with a pioneering complex Salesforce integration. Now, nearly ten years later, Cascade came to us ready for a redesign and an upgrade, to be based on an information architecture developed in partnership with the University of Washington UX department. The resulting modern visual design brings the new brand to life, and the upgraded technical foundation retains the complex functionality CBC needs while increasing performance, security, and flexibility.
Revamping their Visual System
The new CBC website is a complete re-envisioning of their brand–expanded colors, typography, and hierarchical visual system–that they can apply to the broader brand. We added intention to the brand by creating subtle visual elements as an ode to their work and to convey a sense of place and connection for the landscape their riders would be engaging with.
The rhetorical green element (in their primary brand color) was intended to evoke a rider’s journey from point A to point B. The rounded UI elements, more commonly seen on cards or buttons, are a subtle nod to city street corners one might encounter on a commute or group ride. This system is packaged via a living style guide to make consistency and accessibility easily maintainable for the long haul.
Finding Rides
One of the most prevalent aspects of Cascade’s work is organizing community bike rides. Thus, one of the most critical aspects of the website was making it easy for users to find these rides. But Cascade’s rides have a lot of variables–pacing, distance, number of days, cost, who can join, free versus paid–the list goes on. This could quickly become overwhelming for folks looking for rides, especially those new to the biking community.
To make searching for rides less complex, we started by looking at apps we knew their audiences used frequently–AllTrails, Eventbrite, REI, and Strava, for example–to focus on how to create continuity through common design patterns and logic. We made a robust tagging system, a consistent visual language across tags and registration statuses, and turned ride detail pages into clear and scannable chunks of information.
Event Registration System
Cascade needed the same complex ticketing functionality we built into their Drupal 7 website adapted to Drupal 9. But how complex is complex? For Cascade, again, it’s all about variables. Ticket access and pricing can vary based on membership status, age, unique discount codes, and volunteer status. Some people can register early for certain events. Members have early access to some rides and discounted pricing for others. In a nutshell, we needed to build functionality that was customizable at a granular level, but that didn’t make editors reinvent the wheel every time they created a new event.
We solved this by creating a system where site editors can set default event types with default ticket configuration; from there, they can adjust for nuance ad-hoc. We also created the ability to create custom registration question “sets” that can be reused across events and ticket types, and can be unique for each type of ticket–for example, only asking non-members about their interest in membership or only asking about dietary preferences if the event includes a meal.
Membership & Donation System
Past the custom event registration functionality, we built special functionality for checkout, memberships, and donations. Users can add add-ons to tickets during the course of checkout. Members can purchase single or recurring memberships for themselves or their families, and register family members for events in a single order. Orders and memberships are all managed in a centralized account dashboard, where at a glance, users can see all their upcoming rides and events, along with any add-ons for those registrations, any recurring donations and CBC memberships. We also created a single-page donation functionality right in Drupal to streamline the donation process for returning users.
Results and Early Wins
The new cascade.org showcases how complex technical functionality can be packaged into a simple and beautiful user experience.
Post launch
- Over 9,000 paid registrations since launch
- Over 7,000 free group ride registrations since launch
- Over 3,000 memberships purchased since launch
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