Pan/Zoom for Hudl Focus
Helping high school coaches experience more control over their video with the ability to zoom in on the action.
Driving Engagement
Though it started strictly as a software company, in 2018 Hudl branched into the hardware space with a fleet of smart, auto-tracking cameras created for indoor gyms and outdoor stadiums. With the advent of the Focus camera, coaches no longer needed to rely on recruiting a cameraman to film games or watching shaky footage in review sessions.
When I first joined the Hardware Engagement team at Hudl, my new squad was still in the process of hiring a new Product Manager. Without a set development roadmap or a dedicated PM to prioritize business and user needs, it was up to me as a Product Designer to figure out what the Hardware Engagement team needed to work on to provide value to users and increase product engagement.
Defining the Problem
In order to understand what features or fixes our development team needed to build to increase user engagement with the product, I first needed to define what user engagement was. By combing through usage logs of active Hudl Focus cameras, it was clear to see that the higher number of recordings a program had on a camera, the more engaged they were with the product and the more likely they were to renew. Taking that a step deeper, I could see that the number of game recordings far outweighed the number of practice recordings across all Focus devices. Given that teams often have multiple practices for every game that they play, I formed a hypothesis that we were not meeting our users' needs for recording practices. I set out to find out why.
In order to diagnose where Focus devices were falling short of users expectations with recording practices, I conducted over 10 user interviews with Focus users. For these interviews I targeted coaches of all four Focus core sports (American Football, Soccer, Volleyball, and Basketball). I made sure to target both users with a high number of practice recordings as well as those with little to no practice recordings. With this research I aimed to answer a few key questions:
For teams that are using Focus to film practices, what do their workflows look like? What are their biggest pain points?
For teams that are not using Focus to film practices, why not? What is currently stopping them from doing so, and what would make them start doing so?
As well as conducting user interviews with various high school coaches, I spent time pouring through Hudl’s support logs to see what common themes appeared in support calls relating to using Focus cameras for recording practices.
After all of this, one clear theme emerged: Coaches wanted more control over the angles that they were recording with for practice.
Learning by Making
After presenting my findings to the rest of the squad, I lead us as a group through an idea generation activity to think creatively about how we could address this pain point that our users were feeling and provide coaches with more control over the angles that they were recording with for practice. After sorting and ranking our ideas by effort/price of development and user impact, developers and QAs split into groups to quickly prototype our ideas into a reality.
From there I lead a series of usability tests using the various MVPs that developers concocted to validate what would bring users the most value in recording and reviewing their practices using a Hudl Focus camera. Quickly one concept rose to the top: letting users pan and zoom in their video.
In the next two sprints I partnered with developers on the squad to continue testing out the feature and iterating upon it based on real user feedback. We then pulled together a Beta testing group of coaches and athletes from the four Focus core sports to provide any last feedback or catch any bugs before a major release.
Outcome
In only three sprint’s worth of development time, my team was able to fully build and launch a powerful new feature to our users that helped them get more detail out of their video, and empowered them to use their Focus cameras for filming and reviewing practices more often. Our work even ended up earning our squad Hudl’s “Rapid Learning Award” which is given to one of about forty squads every quarter.
To this date (February 2022) over 120,000 individual users across 26,500+ teams have used the feature, with about 1/3 of those users using it every week. In a satisfaction survey sent out a month after the feature’s release 94.1% of coaches cited that they were satisfied with the feature and that it was giving them enough detail to coach from. In the survey, coaches cited that they used the pan/zoom feature for things like identifying jersey numbers, highlighting specific players or movements, reviewing and learning from fouls, and analyzing specific roles in a play. The steady repeated use of the feature, plus its high user sentiment showcases that we were able to drive engagement of Focus cameras by creating a feature that solved users problems.