Athlete discovery app
Transforming the landscape of college recruiting, the SEQL Athlete Discovery app shatters antiquated tracking methods, offering recruiters real-time and accurate athlete data.
Client
SEQL
Year
2021
Role
UX Designer, UX Researcher
College recruiting is often a challenging and time-consuming process, largely due to the limited and at times inflated statistics that are offered on athlete recruiting profiles. This forces recruiters to employ unconventional tactics to track potential athletes. Enter our solution: an innovative athlete database and iOS app. This comprehensive platform provides recruiters with accurate, in-depth athlete information, simplifying the identification of top talents and avoiding wasted resources on candidates who may not align with the program's needs.
Challenge
The current state of college recruiting relies on outdated products and inaccurate data. The lack of effective tools for finding prospective recruits makes the recruiting process expensive, time-consuming and inefficient.
Solution
Our solution streamlines the college recruiting process by creating an interconnected athlete database and iOS app that enables recruiters to quickly discover and monitor potential athletes, providing them with the crucial data needed to find talent faster.
Discovery + User Research
The initial ask
I was assigned the task of redesigning SEQL's Recruiter App MVP. The initial framework and screens had been put together, but it lacked user research and usability testing prior to it's initial launch, resulting in a poor user experience. My role was to identify areas for improvement and enhance the overall experience and design of the application.
Defining User + Journey Pain Points
Recruiters face several challenges in the recruiting process today, including a lack of trust in platforms with user-sourced content and difficulty in finding unique information about athletes. Additionally, recruiters were spending thousands of dollars annually on multiple platforms to track potential recruits, resulting in the need to manually update a central document, such as an excel sheet.To address these issues, we spoke to end users and gathered feedback on their current processes and pain points. We then had end users review the existing MVP to pinpoint areas of improvement in our designs to ensure the MVP met their needs.
Execution
Searchable Athlete Database
Using the discover page, recruiters have the ability to log in to the SEQL database and search for potential athletes for their team. The discover page offers a robust filtering system, allowing recruiters to target certain characteristics such as position, height, or wingspan. The filtered list fields would change based on the recruiter's sport. For example, a football recruiter's filters would look different than a gymnastics or diving recruiter's filters.
User Sourced Content + Verified Data
Our research revealed that recruiters struggled with inaccurate or incomplete athlete profiles on existing platforms. Athletes were able to add unverified information and often failed to keep their profiles up-to-date. To address this issue, we developed a solution that allows athletes to add their information through our sister application, the SEQL Athlete App. This allows recruiters to assess the accuracy of the information, input their own data, request content to verify the information, and track the athlete through their prospect lists.
Organize + Track Prospects
Once added to the prospect board, recruiters would be able to group their prospects based on their priority level, graduating year or position. So instead of relying on excel sheets or open tabs with athlete's 24/7 profiles pulled up – recruiters could now quickly filter down and view all of their top prospects by position and graduating year.
