Trackman
Unleash your potential with radar tracking technology
Context
TrackMan is a company that was founded in 2003 with the idea of using radar technology to improve golf players skills with data.
TrackMan Golf was a very established product in the market and now the company wanted to work on other sports such as Football, Baseball and American Football.
Problem
The Football and American football Apps gained 20 and 15 international club users, starting from zero.
Results
My role: Lead UI/UX Designer
Duration: 3 years
My role at TrackMan
I joined the company as a Lead Product Designer for the Football and American football products. Each designer takes full responsibility for a different app and works with a team that includes PO, PM, developers and QA.
Overtime I got to work in all products of the company: Golf app, Golf virtual reality, Broadcast in the PGA Tour, Baseball practice, Baseball Data & Facility Management.
After working on every project I became Team Sports lead of a team of 5 designers taking care of 6 different applications.
The users
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COACHES
The coach holds the iPad and interprets the data to control the drills and communicate the player what they are supposed to do.
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PLAYERS
Their goal is to practice and improve how they hit the ball to score. After the session they will get the data in their iPhones.
The starting point
The research
Before I joined, other designers had made the first draft following the structure of other already existing apps.
Existing draft
Even though I knew the football rules I didn’t know anything about how a radar could improve the players performance.
Existing design system
Since the golf project had been going on for years, we have to use that design system as much as possible.
From first idea to MVP
Once I got familiar with the app, the topic and the design system, it was time to work on the least amount of features that were needed to launch an MVP and start getting users.
We worked on some features that we (design, PO, PM and devs) decided to postpone for future versions and launch the first version.
Some of the feedback from our first users
“Finally I can improve my hitting technique and get better at free kicks”
Football player
“Now I don’t have to guess which of my players is more consistent when choosing who takes the kick”
Football coach
“Training penalty kicks is fun with TrackMan because I get to see my numbers afterwards in my iPhone”
Football player
The American Football App
In parallel with the Football App, we were working and apply some of the same things we learned from that project. The discipline is different but the idea is the same.
Before starting an activity, there is an onboarding process to connect the radar for the session.
After every kick, the users will see the trajectory of the ball, some numbers and a video of the kick.
All sessions will be stored in the user’s profile to come back later and review them.
What worked in this project
From 0 to 20 international clubs and many more having trials to use the product
Football players have now feedback about their skills and performance
Football clubs gained a better understanding on how to succeed in dead ball situations
The struggles during the development of this project:
- A very small team which made everything move very slowly.
- An old-school industry that is reluctant to new technologies.
- Inventing something new means a lot of demonstrations to prove the potential of the app.
- Football trainers and players are very busy people with almost no free time.
Next steps
After the first version we kept working on the design adding features, fixing bugs and improving the experience to slowly get more users.
The app became more stable, we started getting a lot of data from the clubs and that allowed us to know which areas of the app we had to put the focus on.
That flow kept ongoing for years until I left in 2023 and other designer took over.