TribalScale

ScoutSmarter is an B2B SaaS application that evaluates, organizes and formats player data with observation and insights for NFL/NCAA scouts and coaches.

Timeline

Oct. – Dec. 2024

Team

Design Manager
Product Manager
Software Engineer
QA Engineer
Solutions Architect

Tools

Figma
TestFlight
Aftereffects
Lootie

Role

Product Design Intern

Project Overview

An efficiency app for Scouting in the NFL.

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.

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.

Core Responsibilities

My primary responsibilities included helping define the product strategy, the vision for the product, wireframing & prototyping, and overall supporting MVP delivery.

The Need for ScoutSmarter AI

Problem Statement

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They wanted to create a solution for how athletic scouting and recruiting workflows in American football are manual and outdated.

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

How might we

Improve note-taking and reporting processes for football scouts to reduce time consumption and enhance efficiency, especially during travel?

Discovery

Enhancing efficiency and accuracy

White Paper Research

Research by Sports Tech Journal reveals that over 75% of professional scouts cite time-consuming reporting and disorganization as primary barriers to productivity.

User Interviews

A series of in-depth interviews were then conducted on 2 NFL scouts and 2 operations managers in football teams to further identify pain points, frustrations, needs, and desires with existing products to determine how ScoutSmarter AI could improve this experience.

FINDINGS
01

Scouts need intuitive, multitasking-friendly tools with voice-to-text  to streamline in-game note-taking and post-game analysis.

02

Manual transcription is a major pain point for scouts, as it is error-prone and too time-consuming during fast-paced games.

03

Organizations struggle w/ data aggregation and lack integrated systems to convert scout data into quality insights efficiently.

04

Disparate tools hinder collaboration across teams and create inefficiencies in analyzing and comparing player metrics.

05

Organizations value customizable templates and real-time reporting tools to accelerate drafting decisions and performance reviews.

06

Administrators need a unified, searchable system with API access to streamline data entry and boost efficiency.

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.

Prototyping

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.

MVP

Final Designs

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
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.

Key Takeaways

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.

View more work!

eXp Realty

Compass

Janus