hola. hi. salaam.
Designing a digital home for a karting family in Argentina
A website and brand system for MB1 Racing Kart in Sunchales. Three years of trophies, no online presence, and a family that couldn't reach the sponsors keeping their kids on track.
Role
UX Researcher, with UI support.
Timeline
8 weeks
Team
Cross functional team of 6. Three designers, two developers, one in marketing.
Client
MB1 Racing Kart, Sunchales, Argentina
Deliverable
Full website for the client. UX research, UI design, end to end.
context
A karting family with three years of trophies and no way to be found online
MB1 Racing Kart is a small karting escuela in Sunchales, a town in Santa Fe, Argentina. Three years of trophies, championships against bigger teams, and a coach, Matías Bonvin, who had quietly built a reputation in regional racing. None of which you could find online. No website, no listed email, no easy way for a new sponsor or a curious parent to figure out what the school actually did.
I worked on this with Estefania Rodriguez and Yanina Valenci. The brief from the family was specific. Make them findable. Bring sponsors in. Let new parents discover the methodology without having to scroll Instagram backwards through tagged photos of trophies.
MB1 Racing Kart
The full sentence in the brief said something harder. A family with room for everyone, but limited financial resources hindered many of the students from progressing further. Karting is expensive. Without sponsors, kids age out of the hobby before they can grow into the sport.
research
Other karting schools were just as invisible online as MB1
We started where the family started. News coverage of Matías Bonvin and regional Rotax championships, Instagram pages of other karting teams, and karting forums where parents and pilots aired their frustrations. From there we ran four parent interviews with current MB1 families and synthesized the transcripts on a Miro board with the team. Two patterns came out of the work. One was about the field around MB1. The other was about MB1 itself.
what we looked at
- Four parent interviews. Spanish speaking conversations with current MB1 families. Transcribed and synthesized on Miro with the team.
- Forum and article scrape. News coverage of Matías Bonvin and regional Rotax championships, plus user frustrations in karting forums and blogs.
- Direct competitor benchmark. Three Argentine asphalt karting schools and teams (Cronos Racing Team, Zaffaroni Kart, Marino Competición).
- Indirect competitor benchmark. Escuela Nacional de Karting in Uruguay, the closest example of a karting school that had figured out a real online presence.
what the parents told us
- Family over results. Multiple parents independently called MB1 una familia without being prompted. They valued the human group more than the trophies on the wall.
- A sports psychologist on staff. Every interview flagged the psychologist as something no other karting school in the region offered.
- Telemetry and engineering support. Parents specifically named the technical depth of the team as a competitive edge.
- Sponsorship is the universal pain point. Every family interviewed mentioned the financial weight of the sport. Without sponsors or family help, kids age out before they can grow into the sport.
- Parents are the decision makers, not the marketers. Several said they did not know how to promote their kids on social media, which made a professional online presence even more important.
MB1 parent
what the competitors showed us
01
Cronos Racing Team
02
Zaffaroni Kart
03
Marino Competición
04
Escuela Nacional de Karting
Three of four competitors had no website. The fourth, across the river in Uruguay, was the only one showing us what a real karting school presence could look like.
users
Santiago Bonetti is the parent we kept designing for
Santiago Bonetti is a composite. He came out of four parent interviews and the affinity map we built on Miro. The details below are pulled straight from those conversations.
Santiago is a mechanical engineer from Santa Fe. Two sons, Matías and Pedro, both in the school. Married, middle income, deeply outdoorsy. Three years ago his kids joined MB1 Racing Kart as a hobby, and over those three years the hobby became serious enough that the family started talking about it as a career. The constraint was money. Karting is expensive, and Santiago needed sponsors to keep going.
Every choice I made on this site, from the headline to the contact button, came back to him.
Santiago Bonetti, mechanical engineer and karting dad
Personality
Competitive. Disciplined. Outdoorsy. Mechanical engineer by trade, but the parts of his week that mattered were Saturdays and Sundays at the track with his kids.
Needs
Logistics help for competitions outside Santa Fe. Funding to invest in the sport as more than a hobby. Sponsors who would back his kids the way the school backed them.
Frustrations
Coordinating travel to competitions in other cities. Carrying the economic weight of a sport his kids loved. Finding time inside a week that already had a full job.
Motivations
Watching his sons develop on track. Sharing the sport with his family. Being part of the MB1 Racing Kart community. The embrace at the end of a race.
decisions
Five calls shaped the site
Once the research and persona settled, five decisions set the direction for everything that followed. None of them were obvious from the original brief.
We ran a card sorting study and built a similarity matrix. The hierarchy of the site came directly from how users grouped the cards, not from how the school explained itself internally. Driving Clinic and Pilot School ended up as sibling services in a way the original brief did not anticipate.
solution
A mobile first site, with an IA the family did not write themselves
I delivered the site to the family as a clickable prototype, with a tested IA, a brand system that read as professional, and a contact flow built around WhatsApp. The work below shows how we got from an empty Instagram presence to a complete site, in roughly that order.
card sorting and information architecture
We ran a card sorting study with karting parents and prospective students. The similarity matrix showed where users grouped services together, and where they pulled them apart. The IA below came straight off that matrix.
mood board and UI kit
The brand needed to read as professional to sponsors and warm to families. We pulled references from racing, then sat with the school's own colors and typography until the kit felt like MB1 instead of a generic motorsport site.
low to high fidelity
I iterated through low, medium, and high fidelity on both desktop and mobile, prioritizing the mobile version since most parents browse there.
the final site
The shipped prototype centers WhatsApp as the primary contact, organizes services by what users group together, and treats the desktop site as an extension of the mobile experience, not the other way around.
impact
What we shipped to the family, and what it changed
I handed off the final site to the family with a clickable prototype, a brand system, and a contact flow centered on WhatsApp. The numbers below came back from the post launch usage and from our own usability testing.
60%
increase in digital engagement after launch
80%
contact task completion in usability testing
45%
increase in sponsor inquiries in the first month
<10s
for a user to complete the primary contact action
what we caught in usability testing
- Driving Clinic comprehension. 100 percent of users in usability testing understood the core Driving Clinic service.
- Service discovery. Caught and resolved a discovery issue that had been blocking 20 percent of users.
- Telemetry explanation. Closed one critical information gap by expanding the telemetry copy.
- Training dimensions. Added three missing training dimensions that better reflected the methodology.
- Scannability. Converted 100 percent of service content from prose to bullet based layouts.
- Premium services. Reframed services within a competitive sports context and reprioritized the premium offerings.
what I'd keep with me
- Card sorting saves IA from internal vocabulary. I brought users in for card sorting expecting it to confirm our hierarchy. It restructured it. The school's words and the family's words were not the same words.
- Test the contact channel before you assume. Users reached for WhatsApp without prompting. The form sat behind it as a fallback. In Argentina that read as obvious. In another market it might not.
- An empty market is the brief. Three out of four direct competitors had no website. That kept showing up as a finding. It was also the strategic gap that made the project worth doing.
The brief was to make a small karting school findable. What we built was a centralized digital presence that read as serious to sponsors and warm to families. The school had been winning for three years. The site finally said so out loud.
Turns out karting families are tighter than most companies I've worked with.