ScoutPro
Challenge
Getting scouted by a sports team is every kid’s dream and ScoutPro are in the business of making dreams a reality. After going through the tedious scouting process themselves, the founders were determined to make it simpler for everyone involved — both the athletes and the scouts.
Approach — Branding
The new identity is positioned around rising to the next level — for teams that means to secure future success, and for athletes it means to advance through the ranks until they break through with a professional team. Rigid structures and sharp lines, from the logo through to the UI, aim to reflect the toughness of rugby league, which ScoutPro is centred around. The identity adopts a motivational tone of voice to inspire athletes to pursue their aspirations within the sport.
Approach — UI
Through initial interviews it was evident ScoutPro needed to address the pain points of two parties, scouts and athletes. Scouts still operated through a laborious process for discovering talent which included:
- Physically travelling to games (particularly bothersome for urban scouts having to travel to rural areas).
- Relying on word of mouth for discovery, causing scouts to waste time travelling to games of subpar athletes.
- Unorganised means of communication with athletes and their data.
Athletes faced the issues of:
- Lacking the connections for scouts to pay attention to their games, even if they were putting in good performances.
- For those who live in rural areas, not being consistently under the radar of majority of the best coaches and recruitment managers.
- Having a bad day while a scout is visiting their game.
Functional mobile prototypes (made in ProtoPie) to test usability on devices with limited screen real estate.
Outcome
Addressing the primary pain points of both scouts and athletes during the scouting process, ScoutPro provides a platform to effortlessly identify, track, and manage growing talent.
An in-depth player search is at the forefront of ScoutPro, helping scouts to discover potential talent through data rather than relying on word-of-mouth. Rising Stars highlights recent top performers, no matter where they’re from, giving each athlete an equal opportunity to get in front of scouts.
The Watchlist provides scouts with a centralised hub to track and manage promising athletes. Sending a ScoutPass (premium feature) gives the scouts access to full fitness data, as well as custom data and messaging — allowing scouts to set up individual development plans for each athlete.
Through customer conversations, it was evident isolated statistics didn’t provide context. As a result, supplementary charts were added to assist scouts in better identifying growing talent and make clearer calculated decisions. Additionally, if an athlete has a bad day while a scout is visiting, charts provide reassurance that their opportunity is not missed — relieving performance pressure and helping athletes focus on their game.
Match data provides scouts further contextual information to analyse athlete performance. From past and future fixtures to the league standings (ladder) and individual match events, with direct links to athlete profiles.
More Work
