ROLE & PROJECT OVERVIEW

I was working directly under a Senior Product Designer right from scratch by strategizing, conceptualizing, designing and delivering the hand-offs to the developers for both the Mobile and Web platforms. My primary responsibilities included helping define the product strategy, the vision for the product, wireframing low fidelity designs to prototyping high fidelity designs. It was an incredible learning experience to collaborate with the product managers and developers at TribalScale by managing the entire design lifecycle in bringing out the product live.

THE NEED FOR SCOUT SMARTER AI

Our clients were seasoned NFL scouts with over 20+ years of experience, contributing to multiple Super Bowl teams. They wanted to create a solution for how athletic scouting and recruiting workflows in American football are manual and outdated. This friction compromises productivity and decision making.

1.  Expanding Pool of Athletes - "The increase in the number of reports required is nearly impossible."
2. Manual Draft Player Reports - "There is no time to manually write the excess amount of reports."
3. Quality Control - "The extra burden affects the overall quality of work and health of teammates."

DESIGNING THE AGILE WAY

The product was meant to reach the users as soon as possible since this was the first version of the product and the evolving mobile world demanded a need for it. Hence, the agile methodology was defined to bring out the product quickly. Each step of the process was very quick and at its best pace contributing to the development of the product.

DISCOVERY: ENHANCING EFFICIENCY AND ACCURACY

According to insights gathered from interviews with seasoned NFL scouts, a single scouting trip generates dozens of handwritten notes, voice recordings, and manual reports, often unstructured and difficult to access later. Research by Sports Tech Journal reveals that over 75% of professional scouts cite time-consuming reporting and disorganization as primary barriers to productivity. These insights informed features such as offline voice recording, real-time transcription, and advanced search and filtering, ensuring ScoutSmarter addresses the most critical user needs.

In a discovery phase with 2 NFL/NCAA scouts and 2 operations managers in football teams, we identified key pain points and opportunities for innovation:

USER JOURNEY MAPPING

The journey map guided feature prioritization, including offline functionality, transcription services, and focused list management. The research results clearly showed that the participants would want to have the basic features that helped us to nail the workflow for the product, phasing the strategy and a clear product feature roadmap.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Designing for the user experience began from sketching out a typical user journey based on the accomplishment of specific tasks within the app. Once the user journey had been established, we began to unpack the design flow for general and specific use cases.

CONCEPTUALIZATION & LO-FI PROTOTYPES

After finding out the basic requirements of the user, the key features were identified and ideated. Iterating with low-fidelity prototypes were of great use in identifying components for framing the design system and also to get an initial feedback from the team before we stepped into concentrating on the visual design which required a large effort.

VOICE-TO-TEXT REPORT TRANSCRIPTION

The primary function of ScoutSmarter that most users needed was voice-to-text report transcription during games. It lets scouts quickly take notes during games and was the first feature we built to address their biggest pain point.

FILTERING AND SORTING ITEMS

The primary function of filtering and sorting was to help users quickly organize and find players and teams based on specific criteria. This feature was essential for managing large datasets and became a core part of the product. I learned the importance of universal design when selecting icons and filter options, especially when designing for our personas of older scouts with no experience using digital tools.

ACCESSIBLE DESIGN: DARK MODE

Dark mode was designed to improve accessibility for users, especially older scouts who often worked in low-light environments. I focused on creating a visually comfortable experience by using high-contrast colors and readable text, ensuring it met the needs of users with varying levels of digital familiarity.

DESIGN SYSTEM AND APP BRANDING

A design system was created for each operating system incorporating the set of visual elements like colour, typography and UI components. These components were, in turn, converted as symbols in sketch to use the elements throughout the application. This not just helped me in design but also allowed developers to reuse components increasing code efficiency. Below is a sample.

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMWORK GETS THINGS DONE.

The ability to collaborate across cross-functional teams is an essential quality of a product designer. I got to collaborate with managers, developers working on multiple platforms, quality assurance team, marketers to bring out the product to the customers. This helped me in accomplishing the goals as a team. Setting goals and planning them according to timelines was one of the challenging aspects. Though the project was time-boxed we managed to bring out a successful minimum viable product that served the users.