Athlete app

How I redesigned an acquired web app into a native iOS experience for high school athletes — solving for profile accuracy, long-term engagement, and seamless integration with the recruiter platform.

My role

Lead UX Designer & Researcher

Team

Product, engineering, business stakeholders

Timeline

2021 - 2022

The recruiting process is opaque for most high school athletes. The platforms that exist to help them are often expensive, poorly designed, and optimized for the platform's revenue rather than the athlete's success. SEQL's goal was to build something genuinely different: a free, well-designed athlete profile that actually got seen by college recruiters. SEQL had acquired a basic web app from an external agency. My job was to redesign it as a native iOS app using React Native, align it with SEQL's new brand, and ensure it worked in tight integration with the Athlete Discovery App on the recruiter side.

Discovery + User Research

The initial ask

"I filled out my profile two years ago and haven't touched it since. I don't even know if anyone is looking at it."
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The core problem wasn't building a profile — it was keeping it accurate and current. Research with athletes and parents surfaced a compounding issue:
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Stale data. Most athlete profiles were set up once and never updated. Stats, highlight videos, and contact info went out of date quickly — making profiles actively harmful to recruiting chances.
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No reason to return. The existing web app had no engagement mechanism. Athletes created a profile and left. There was nothing pulling them back to keep information current.
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Opaque process. Athletes and parents had limited understanding of what recruiters actually looked for. This led to either over-reliance on expensive "profile boost" services or simply not knowing how to present themselves effectively.

My approach

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.

Phase 1

Identified distinct athlete segments by age, sport, and recruiting stage. A senior swimmer actively in the recruiting process has very different needs from a 9th-grade soccer player just starting to think about college. The MVP had to serve both.

Phase 2

Worked with product and engineering to scope the iOS MVP. Prioritized features that directly drove profile completeness and accuracy — the inputs the recruiter-side platform depended on — before engagement features.

Design Process

Two design problems required specific attention beyond standard iOS patterns.
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The first was onboarding. Phone-based sign-up was a deliberate choice over email — research showed athletes frequently changed email addresses, leading to account access issues, while phone numbers were stable and the preferred channel for recruiter communication. This was a small decision with meaningful retention implications.
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The second was the engagement problem. A profile app has an inherent usage cliff — athletes complete setup and have no reason to return. I proposed SEQL Studios as a content layer: educational videos on the recruiting process, day-in-the-life content from current college athletes, and sport-specific coaching from professional ambassadors. Crucially, it also featured spotlight content of SEQL athletes themselves, creating a social incentive to keep profiles updated and media current.
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I validated the Studios concept through usability sessions testing different content formats and entry points before the feature was built, which informed both the content strategy and the information architecture.

Execution + Learnings

Streamlined Sign Up

Phone-first onboarding with a minimal setup flow, reducing friction at the point where most users drop off. The decision to prioritize phone over email was research-driven and directly addressed a retention problem in the existing product.

Athlete profile

A dynamic profile designed to encourage ongoing updates rather than one-time completion. Prominent CTAs, simplified editing, and clear indicators of profile strength gave athletes a reason to keep coming back and a clear sense of what was missing.

SEQL Studios

An in-app content hub with educational recruiting resources, college athlete spotlights, and professional coaching content. The feature served two functions: providing genuine value that differentiated SEQL from competitors, and creating a recurring reason to open the app and keep profile data current.

Desktop profile view

A responsive desktop editing experience with wider gutters and fixed side navigation, maintaining consistency with the iOS app while optimizing for athletes who preferred to manage their profiles on a larger screen.

The Outcome

The app shipped as the iOS MVP integrated with SEQL's recruiter platform, giving the recruiter-side database its first reliable source of athlete-verified profile data. Post-launch, the Studios feature drove measurably higher return visit rates compared to the profile-only baseline — validating the engagement hypothesis from research. The platform served athletes across 24 sports at no cost to the athlete or their family.

What I'd Do Differently

The 13–19 age range is genuinely wide — a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old in active recruitment have meaningfully different mental models of the recruiting process. I'd push harder to test with younger athletes specifically, since most of our usability sessions skewed toward upperclassmen who were already deep in the process. The onboarding and educational content would likely benefit from more age-aware design than the MVP achieved.

Next Project

Partselerate