SEQL Athlete app
A dynamic recruiting profile for high school athletes that seamlessly synchronizes with a recruiter database, increasing athletes chances of standing out to schools.
Client
SEQL
Year
2021
Role
UX Designer, UX Researcher
In the competitive world of college recruiting, where only 500,000 out of 8 million high school athletes make it to the collegiate level, a significant number of promising talents are overlooked due to a lack of knowledge about what recruiters seek. The existing process is marred by predatory platforms charging high fees for athlete profiles, exploiting the unfamiliarity of students and parents. Our solution, a free platform coupled with the Athlete Discovery App, addresses these issues, providing education, verification, and transparency in the recruitment process to level the playing field for all aspiring athletes and colleges.
Challenge
One of the first steps in a high school athletes recruiting journey is creating a recruitment profile. The problem? The majority of these platforms prey on students and parents who are unfamiliar with the college recruiting space, promising to help the athletes get in front of top programs for a high fee.
Solution
To create an athlete profile that eliminates fees for the player and their parents, provides educational resources on the recruiting process, and works in tandem with a recruiter database. Ensuring that their profile is actually seen by a recruiter.
Discovery + User Research
The initial ask
I was tasked with redesigning a web app that the company had acquired from an external agency, into an iOS app using React Native. Additionally, I was responsible for updating the app's design to align with the company's new branding, and incorporating improvements to ensure seamless integration with the company's recruiters' Athlete Discovery App.
Defining our User + Their Goals
SEQL aims to serve a diverse group of 13-19 year old high school athletes, including both male and female athletes across 24 different sports. In order to create an effective experience for this audience, we began the ideation phase by identifying common pain points in the current recruiting process and defining the unique needs and challenges of athletes based on factors such as age, sport, and gender.Once we identified our user's needs, we worked together with the development team and business stakeholders to create our feature set for the MVP iOS product.
Execution
Sign up flow
We created a seamless sign in flow for new and existing users. We also emphasized phone sign up over email since it was the preferred method of communication between athletes and recruiters, and also minimized the pain point of users losing access to their account if they changed emails.
Athlete profile
Our research found that most athlete profiles contain outdated and inaccurate data. In response, we focused on encouraging users to add new data, by incorporating prominent call-to-action buttons and simplifying the process for quickly adding and editing information.
SEQL Studios
To further encourage user engagement and retention, we introduced SEQL Studios - a collection of educational videos on the college recruiting process, day-in-the-life videos of current college athletes, sport-specific videos with our team of professional sport ambassadors, and spotlight videos of SEQL athletes that showcase their uploaded video content. This feature not only set us apart from our competitors, but also provided a reason for our athletes to come back to the application and keep their profiles updated. To validate this feature, we conducted usability sessions to validate the feature, experiment with different video formats, and gather feedback for future releases.
Athlete profile desktop view
To ensure that all athletes can have a SEQL profile, we also created a desktop editing view. This view includes modifications such as wider gutters and a fixed side navigation, to optimize the desktop experience while maintaining consistency with the iOS version.
