Recent Work: District Karaoke
District Karaoke is a social, team-based karaoke league in DC. In addition to being awesome, they have experienced fantastic growth in their first year, growing to five separate nights of competition each week in DC and nearby Arlington, VA. We have been working with District Karaoke since their second season of competition, helping them expand and refine their voting and standings application. For the spring 2013 season, District Karaoke wanted to make some big changes. Responding to their participants, they refined their voting to use a clearer and easier to understand format. Each week the six teams at each venue are paired into one-on-one matchups, and each performance is ranked by total number of votes from the crowd at the bar.
A key requirement for District Karaoke was to have the voting pages work well with the widest possible selection of mobile phones. District Karaoke's previous voting system used sliders that were hard to use even on modern phones, but depended on a JavaScript framework with poor cross-browser functionality. As a result, some voters at the bar each night were forced to fill out paper voting forms, or worse, refrained from voting.
To support District Karaoke's new voting and expanding requirements, we replaced significant portions of their existing Rails application that supported voting and standings. On the back-end, District Karaoke staff and weekly MCs now have a full administrative interface that allows admins to start and stop voting, create new songs in the District Karaoke songbook as new hits are added to the catalog, and review voting data. A new data importer allows the commissioner to load the entire season of data (divisions, venues, teams, performers, captains) through the use of an Excel sheet import.
District Karaoke's commissioner wanted the mobile voting page to have a cleaner, flatter appearance. We worked with District Karaoke's co-founder, who is a designer, to give the site a much-needed refresh. We chose to use Five Tool Development's flatstrap-rails gem to get a flat look across the site. We did away with shiny, "lickable" buttons, and adopted two-dimensional iconography and logos.
On the front-end, the voting application now supports a responsive layout and relies on much simpler JavaScript that works on many more phones. Voting can be conducted at multiple venues simultaneously (a big need that was not addressed in District Karaoke's initial MVP), and users can browse and search the song catalog from their phones. District Karaoke no longer needs to spend significant funds on printing and updating songbooks that are passed around the bar as participants look to choose their next performance.
We are very excited to be working with District Karaoke, and are looking forward to their forthcoming expansion to other cities around the country. If you're lucky (or unlucky), you may even be able to find Five Tool co-founder Geoff Harcourt singing "... Baby One More Time" at a District Karaoke event.
If you're interested in playing next season, registration begins in July. Follow District Karaoke on Twitter and Instagram (the photos are great).
