Recruit

Designing a Faster, Smarter Evaluation Experience for College Recruiters

My Role: Product Designer

Project Details:  Website Design, B2B, 2024

Project Overview

CONTEXT
This project was part of my work as a Product Designer at Hudl. I focused on improving the athlete evaluation workflow for college recruiters. The project started with an opportunity in player tagging for American football. By tagging individual player in games, we were able to generate more accurate and detailed playlists with the correct video footage. Since recruiters primarily use Hudl to access game film, this opened the door to using data to make video more useful and efficient to navigate.

PROBLEM
Division 1 college recruiters evaluate thousands of athletes each season, but their tools were disconnected and difficult to use. The existing workflow relied heavily on manual playlist creation and video review, often without the data needed to support confident decision-making. Recruiters needed a faster and smarter way to discover, evaluate, and track athletes. The solution needed to combine objective performance data with contextual video clips in a single, efficient workflow.

OUTCOME
We released an MVP experience that integrated advanced data directly into Recruit. Performance stats were linked to video cutups, and recruiters could generate playlists automatically based on metrics. The MVP included 450 top athletes and laid the foundation for a more scalable and data-driven recruiting platform. This work shaped the next phase of the product, where Recruit becomes a central evaluation hub that offers deeper filters, stat benchmarking, athlete tracking, and a more unified workflow across recruitment tools.

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Phase 1 – Proof of Concept

• Created early wireframes to test the idea of linking stats to video cutups
• Learned that the concept had potentials, but engagement was low due to limited athlete relevance
• Helped shape MVP direction with more focused data coverage

Phase 2 – User Interviews & Feedback

• Conducted initial interviews with 10+ college recruiters (UNC, UVA, Georgia State, etc.)
• Conducted user interviews
• Focused on understanding recruiter pain points and evaluation workflows
• Collaborated with domain experts to identify key performance metrics and prioritise what mattered most
• Translated findings into clear design principles: simplify, surface context, and support comparison

Phase 3 – MVP Design & Delivery

• Designed key user flows for stat filtering, playlist generation, and athlete tracking
• Refined visual hierarchy to emphasise scanability and reduce cognitive load
• Adapted design patterns to align with Recruit’s design system, proposing new components where needed
• Worked closely with engineering to balance delivery speed and design quality  
• Worked closely with content to support to ensure smooth user educaitons

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Engagement and Impact

We used analytical tool to track early product engagement and collected qualitative feedback from the users

• Recruiters reported faster athlete discovery and improved clarity in evaluation
• Users highlighted playlist generation and stat-to-video workflows as major time-savers
• Feedback helped validate roadmap direction and influenced additional product investments

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Takeaways

This project challenged me to design within complexity. We had to balance system constraints, specific data, and real user needs. One of the most rewarding parts was learning how recruiters think, what data matters most, and how to present that data in a way that is clear, builds trust and enables faster decisions. I gained experience working across teams, collaborating with different product teams and domain experts to create an experience that combined functional depth with a clear, focused design solution. I’m proud of how this MVP laid a strong foundation for Recruit’s evolution and how design played a central role in delivering user and business value.

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