Design Refresh & Modernization
As a legacy product, the athlete experience carried significant technical debt, making feature iteration slow and costly. With an urgent business need to modernize the experience under strict timeline and engineering constraints, I partnered closely with Product to drive a targeted design refresh. By focusing on high-impact, scoped UI updates, we successfully modernized the interface, improved usability, and met core business goals without triggering a massive technical rebuild.
The Challenge
The two main goals of addressing the recruiting product for student athletes and families is retention of existing customers and acquisition of new customers. It is important to continue to drive new sales to drive the health of the business as well as loyally serve and maintain customer satisfaction. The design and development investment in experience enhancements and a visual overhaul is all in effort to serve those two main goals.
How do we align the legacy experience to the new brand standards of IMG Academy?
How do we provide developers the designs quickly in order to stay within the limited timeline available to accomplish this project?
What areas of the legacy athlete product are in the biggest need of enhancement?
Who are the key stakeholders for this project and how can they help us accelerate the product, design, and development?
Research & Personas
Once the project was green lit, we had to move fast. I leveraged our internal stakeholders as a powerhouse of domain knowledge to build our UX strategy. By anchoring our decisions around three core personas, we mapped out exactly how our internal business goals could best serve our end users: student-athletes and their families.
Sales: Recruiting Specialist
“I want to be able to easily explain to athletes and families why they should use our product.”
Needs
Product Differentiators: NCSA can help with every level of the recruiting journey. Recruiting Specialists need quickly be able to communicate that NCSA has a huge college coach audience, real time exposure, and the individualize personal coaching to help with recruiting.
Value Proposition: College coach exposure is a tangible way that athletes and families can see how NCSA is making a difference for their recruiting journey.
Challenges
Limited Time: When a family is on a call with a recruiting specialist, they have limited time to answer questions and demonstrate the value of NCSA and what can be individually provided.
Knowledge Gaps: Athletes and families can come to NCSA with varying levels of recruiting knowledge and at varying points in their recruiting journeys. Recruiting Specialists need to meet the family where they are at and be able to communicate how NCSA can make a difference.
Support: Recruiting Coaches
“I want to helps athletes achieve their dreams of playing in college.”
Needs
Recruit Partnership: Recruiting Coaches can individually only take an athlete so far. They need the recruit to show effort, work on their profile, research schools, and attend workshops to see more success.
Easy Tool: Recruiting can be accelerated by simple tasks but when they have to explain those tasks over and over to recruits, it becomes arduous.
Challenges
Profile Completion: In order for college coaches to see a more complete picture of a recruit, they need a robust recruiting profile. Despite encouragement, it remains very daunting for athletes to complete their profile.
Volume of Clients: Recruiting Coaches can be working with 100+ recruits and families. It is a tall order to maintain a level of quality service while keeping the advice customized to each recruits journey.
Student Athletes & Families
“I want to get recruited. What do I need to do?”
Needs
Support: Working hand in hand with a recruiting expert who has been a student athlete and eventually recruited student athletes can be the key to unlocking unknown parts of the recruiting journey for a family.
Exposure: Knowing if they are getting in front of the right coaches, at the right time, with the right information, is critical. This is a direct way that parents are able to visualize a return on their investment in a premium service.
Matching: Narrowing down to a list of programs that would be a good fit based on what an athlete has provided serves as a helpful starting point.
Challenges
Profile Completion: It is easy to get overwhelmed with the volume of information that can be entered. The current experience feels busy and overwhelming to try to complete.
Knowledge Gaps: With varying experience with recruiting, how can resources be easily available to parents to browse and connect with as they experience the recruiting process. The product should encourage a directionality that assists athletes and families on what they can do next.
Support: When a parent has questions or ideas, it is important that they know where they can go and who can they speak to in order to come to a resolution or understanding.
The Solution
The core objective was to design an intuitive experience for athlete profile completion that balances student athlete capabilities with college coach expectations. We focused on three core areas that served all the personas that would facilitate the best outcome for recruiting connections.
Leading blurb header
Supportive blurb
Early Stage Milestones
Starting your Profile: This the first official step in the recruiting journey allows IMG Academy+ to learn a little more about your interests and what sport you play.
Appear in Searches: Completing basic academic and athletic information allows the athlete to start appearing in search results right away.
Increase Exposure: Enhancing their profile by adding video, individual athletic stats, academic information, or sharing a little bit about themselves can go a long way when it comes to your first impression with coaches
Final Designs
The final designs focusing on the flow of those core experiences elevated the experience far exceeding what the legacy athlete experience provided for student athletes and families.