Hudl

Hudl

Designer → Design Leader
Jul 2016 – Jan 2018hudl.com

In my two stints at this sports software company, I quickly moved from entry-level designer to trusted design leader.

I joined Hudl in 2013 when they were a team of 70 people. They’ve since grown to well over 2000 employees worldwide. I quickly grew from a designer to a Product Design Team Lead, which meant I served as a feature designer on a cross-functional team while also managing 2-3 designers.

Product designers were generalists who took part in all phases of the design process, from research to execution. We would also work in teams. So, depending on the project, I may have served as a researcher, a UX designer, a UI designer, a front-end developer, or all four.

Here’s a select sampling of my work in my three total years at Hudl, across two stints.

The Video Library

A team of four designers worked together to design the video library, a core screen of Hudl. I contributed to the UI design and also did much of the front-end development to bring the page to life.

Hudl Library // Role: Product Designer, Front-end Developer
Hudl Library // Role: Product Designer, Front-end Developer

Clipping Video Prototype

Video game developers use a technique called “grayboxing” to determine if a game is actually fun to play before putting effort into the graphics, AI, and all the other hard stuff. This idea is useful in product design as well, especially when the interaction itself is the most important bit.

In Hudl, there’s a concept of creating a clip from a longer video but we didn’t feel like the interaction was quite right. It felt too cumbersome for the “simple” action of creating a clip. I quickly built an HTML/CSS/JS prototype to combine a few mouse and keyboard actions, dramatically speeding up the process. The team ended up taking this prototype and using it to drive a clipping workflow redesign.

A gray-box prototype to test some key interactions

Toast Prototype

All designers at Hudl used Uniform, our shared design system. My team was working on a feature that needed a toast notification, but Uniform hadn’t provided toasts yet. I jumped in and prototyped a solution through an HTML/CSS/JS prototype playground, and Uniform eventually merged in my contributions.

A prototype of our Toast component

Highlight Editor

For most of my time at Hudl, I was a designer on the team that worked on highlight video editing tools for athletes. I also led the team that integrated highlight “themes” powered by and sponsored by Gatorade. We delicately balanced making intrinsically cool themes that didn’t feel sponsored while also giving Gatorade the brand presence they wanted.

Hudl Highlight Editor // Role: Product Designer, Front-end Developer
Hudl Highlight Editor // Role: Product Designer, Front-end Developer

Other Work

In my first stint at Hudl (2013-2014), I also worked as the product designer on some high-visibility mobile or HTML5 redesign projects including

  • Redesigning our site-wide navigation to support a mobile-friendly responsive layout
  • Redesigning our main video player in HTML5 to replace the existing Silverlight player
  • Redesigning the video exchanges system to be mobile friendly
  • Redesigning our login form to be more on brand