Next Gen
A data heavy approach to NCAA football scouting
Transforming a complex and data-intensive product into a user-friendly solution that assists scouts in identifying premier players for leading schools, helps coaches monitor their players' data and competition, and enables players to determine their rankings against other competitors. Alongside user research, we utilized our knowledge of video game interfaces from sports games as benchmarks for creating an easy-to-use product, even with restrictive inputs like a controller.
Year
2023-2024
Client
nextgenprospect.com
making the best assistant for coaches, scouts and players
Kick off
NGP's team contacted us since they thought they had a great product in their hands but it simply wasn't gaining traction, they had the tech, the data, the industry know hows and contacts, yet their users numbers kept dwindling.
Our first task was talking to those users, the team and using the product ourselves. We found a very complex tool that had the following major problems for users:
It was slow to load and a resource hog, since the player database was being loaded at once, it took about 40 seconds on a 200 Mbs connection to open and then it was a slugfest even on a powerful machine, people trying to use it on older laptops or tablets simply crashed their browsers
Due to trying to make the Ui as out of the way as possible, icons were used excessively leading to users not knowing what each icon represented and made exploring the app even slower waiting for the hover tooltip to appear
There wasn't an onboarding experience for this very robust app
The most used tool search was very complicated to use which led to most churn
Our users
From the user research sessions we identified the 3 concurrent user personas that helped us map different journeys, pain points and psychological triggers to reduce churn, help market fit and make a tool that would help them best.
The Scout
A professional football scout who's responsible for identifying talented high school players for college or professional teams.
Needs / Goals
• Access to comprehensive player data.
• Efficient player discovery and evaluation tools.
• Communication with players and coaches.
• Identify talented high school players.
• Build a talent pool for college or professional teams.
Pain points
• Slow current app.
• Too many features.
• Hard to use product.
• No mobile support.
• Needs custom views at hand during games
The Player
A high school football player aspiring to play at the college level.
Needs / Goals
• Visibility to college recruiters.
• Tools for showcasing skills and achievements.
• Access to performance analytics.
• Attract college scouts and secure scholarships.
• Track personal progress and set targets.
Pain points
• Slow current app.
• I can never find myself
• I want to be able to share my stats and track them within the app
The Coach
From having an excel spreadsheet and manually tracking data, he now is always looking for the best app to help him take his team to the top and beyond.
Needs / Goals
• Player performance data for strategizing.
• Communication with players and parents.
• Training and goal-setting tools.
Improve team performance and player development.
• Keep parents informed and engaged.
Pain points
• Slow current app.
• Has only used search and board features, rest are clutter
• Can't use it on Ipad during matches
• Has had instances where he thought he had tracked a player and when revisiting app there wasn't anything in the track view.
The game plan
With these insights and some brainstorming sessions with the product team, we proposed updating the design by subtraction, a bit skeptical the Product Owner requested a fork and naming the product Lite, we'd focus on these core areas and pain points our research sessions had uncovered with the features they had built in a more user centric product.
We narrowed it down to:
• A dashboard- Users would pick up where they left and see their latest tracked players, looking to solve the issue of getting lost between uses, find key players and reconnecting with a their previous search.
• Players board- A table with all the data that would be fetched per page to reduce load times and make the app snappier, from here players could find, analyze, compare and track players.
• Team board- Same approach to players but focusing on teams, their stats and comparing between them.
• Tracked- Here a user could find tracked players and teams so coaches can keep tabs of important players, scouts for possible drafts and players of their own stats, friends and rival school players' data.
By narrowing down the experience, we could also track with users more closely how the redesigned UX impacted their pain points and make sure the hypothesis presented above with the personas was connected to the general product audience as well as minimizing engineering expenses.
The dashboard
While last to be designed, this would be a users first step into the product whenever they come back, you can see your latest tracked players or teams cards and quickly go to their profiles and your last search so you can pick up where you left off during your last session.
All Players
After user research and benchmarking we decided to use tables to show as much data as possible in the all players and all team's view, we'd also use pagination vs scroll loading to reduce page size and improve performance on any device. Column headers could be clicked to sort by the column value.
Filter system
We tested a few concepts for filtering and the one that had the best acceptance and served multiple user journeys, personas and so many potential combinations was one similar to notions, where you can add multiple filters stacked and can have logical gates such as Is, Is not, contains, numerical ranges and more.
Player stats
During our research and with surveys we set out to rank the most important stats for players to best determine, hierarchy, what would be in tabs or secondary views and designing a view that best served the most common journeys for our users while still offering a trove of data.
All Teams
For the teams page we first started with a similar page as All Players, but users were quick to point out that having transaction data was a must, a key part of their workflow, so we added separate tabs and then with analytics determined it also had to be the default view. We also added a default filter for the current season since it was a pattern 85% of users were applying.
Tracked Players and Teams
One of the most common user journeys we identified during our first sessions was going back and searching for the same player or team constantly, which is why we designed this page and added it to the dashboard, an easy way to keep tabs of important players for any of our personas.
Next Play
While devs implemented all the changes above, we were tasked with enhancing the search features, that currently simply did not work. We combined patterns we were using and had improved use time, interactions and satisfaction when testing prototypes to our ideas as well as some Q&A sessions to find what an advanced search could look like that helped our users the most.
Wrapping it up
For the final leg of the project we started working on mobile versions of the main screens, due to budget constraints we weren't able to fully test the designs with users, hear feedback, iterate and keep evolving the app.
What would have come next
We'd always like to keep polishing our projects as long as possible but we know that sometimes that's not possible, while we are sure the positive impact of our redesign will help NGP cater better to their users, retain new subscribers, sign up new ones and drive value our next goals would have been:
• Polishing mobile to make it as fully fleshed as desktop to expand the userbase, time spent on app and retention rates.
• New research sessions to ensure all the new features were solving user pain points.
• Polishing onboarding
• A paywall that would drive more free tiers to subscription tiers.
• Eventually a Ui design that resembles the energy of football with more striking visual elements, some cool micro animations, but Material design was amazing to hit the ground running and we didn't find a component that needed to be created from scratch.
