Research on Focus Flex Camera in relation with Hudl Highlights

Position

Product
Designer

Duration

May - July 2022

Role

Sole product researcher

Tools & Methods

FigJam- Data gathering and Competitive Analysis
Hudl Sync- Document database

Overview

ABOUT HUDL

Hudl Agile Technologies is a performance analysis technology-based company that offers a range of tools like cameras called Focus cameras that automatically capture all the action and allow live streaming for sports teams to meet the needs at different levels, across different countries.

FOCUS FLEX CAMERA

It is a newly released camera with the following aspects :

A portable camera just made for soccer
Built-in real-time live streaming and uploading over wifi/ethernet/4G plans.
Automatic uploads with no additional processing time

Background

Hudl highlight is a feature on the Hudl platform for users to create a video that can be made automatically or manually by selecting and compiling the most important or interesting moments from the video into a condensed version.

In order to gain a general understanding of how video highlights can be used with the new Hudl focus flex camera as a way to fill in the gaps for:

Providing updated perspectives with the inclusion of the new camera
Providing a better view of areas for improvement for Hudl, the club soccer players

What am I working on

Help the ACVC Team in the Netherlands to understand how highlights work and how can the Focus Flex camera improve it

Research Expectations

Preparing a study for highlights to focus mainly on the sport - Club soccer.

Coming up with a overview about highlights on Hudl.com

Gathering required data metrics available that show how well highlights are used by users in order to understand their inefficiencies.

Understanding of how competitors solve the problem for parents, players & coaches.

Answering questions about whether Flex's video is good enough to help players get recruited.

Last but not least, answering what Focus Flex has been missing about improving highlights.

Research Goals

Understanding how video highlights operate at the Hudl Fan Team

A research plan that includes a detailed report in order to help improve highlights using Flex Camera

Identifying internal Hudlies with whom the significance of Hudl's highlights can be discussed in relation to user needs.

To come up with helpful & useful information to the ACVC Team on all about Hudl highlights

My role

My responsibilities as a Product Design Intern in this research study included me do the following:

Using my design knowledge on how to conduct internal research within a fixed period.
Coming up with a project timeline to be organized and to be completed within the given date.
Communicating with other teams at Hudl to get resources for the creation and data trends in highlights.
Conducting different user research methods and analyzing feedback data.
Creating a medium for the hardware team to learn about highlights in an accessible manner.
To gain a deeper understanding of the needs and pain points of Hudl's users and use this insight to inform product decisions.

Plan of Action

Creating a Plan of Action will ensure that the design research process I follow is well-structured, goals and objectives are clear, and progress can be monitored and measured effectively.

It also allowed me as a designer to communicate my ideas and progress to the project manager, helping to ensure alignment and transparency throughout the process.

Figure- Plan of Action

Project Timeline

From the plan of action to establishing a roadmap for the design process, and outlining the steps that need to be taken to achieve the desired outcomes helped me to identify the resources, timelines, and milestones required to achieve the research study effectively.

Ultimately, creating a project timeline helped a product designer like me to ensure that my work is focused, effective, and aligned with the project's goals and objectives.

Figure- Research study timeline

Primary Research

The first step in the research process was to contact a designer working for the Fan Team to get an overview of Hudl's highlights. As a point of contact throughout my research, this designer helped me to leverage the knowledge transfer I received from her.

Following are some important points I gathered to facilitate my next step.

There are two types of highlights, classic and hudl beta.

In hudl classic, players can only create highlights from videos that coaches have created and uploaded and those highlights can only be posted on social media.
For players and coaches, hudl beta features are almost identical except for saving, naming, and adding effects to highlights.

There are more coach-friendly features in Hudl beta than in Hudl classic, including adding more player names to the team and assigning a highlight to a certain player.

Creating highlights from game videos is different from creating highlights from a player's or team's profile.

Combining different highlight clips into one is called a highlight reel.

Whenever a highlight gets saved it is automatically published in the player's profile or the team's profile.

Many types of content, such as themes, music library songs, and slides, need to be updated from Hudl's end. Depending on the contract between Hudl and the sports company, themes change.

Secondary Research

In order to understand the on what basis highlights are created from Hudl's perspective and the user's perspective, I resorted to four sources of information present:

Hudl Sync: A one-stop place where all hudlies document their work for sharing & editing across the organization
Dovetail: A software application designed for user research analysis and collaboration that is web-based allowing teams to organize and analyze user research data such as user feedback, customer feedback, usability test results, and more.
Hudl Surveys
Looker Metrics

Hudl Sync

From Hudl Sync, I gathered information related to hudl focus flex beta interviews information where for highlights I found out that

Players can create highlights from the Focus Flex video where work has not been started yet.
This can call recruiters using highlights on social media platforms.
More work on video quality and the black triangle is obstructing the video thus also affecting highlights.

Dovetail

Dovetail provides a lot of research information on Hudl Beta research interviews forming a focus on how highlights are important for the users.

Highlight creation depends on aesthetics and video quality with features like player zoom-in to help parents, in particular.
Players and parents always look forward to watching highlights after the game and sharing these highlights on social media platforms.
Highlights look good on the big screen, but not on mobile phones. Coloring different types of highlights would be helpful.
Player tagging on their own in highlights would be helpful for the users as these highlights will help them to learn how to progress in their game.

Hudl Surveys

The Hudl Assist team sent out a survey to coaches, athletic directors, players, and parents to collect information related to how hudl assist helps in the highlights feature in the hudl tool.

Ability to choose the angle and position of the camera as it matters while making/analyzing videos and highlights.
Time and money invested are important for coaches and players.
Videos and highlights are to be shared in a fast and efficient manner.
Delay in the upload of videos thus the late creation of highlights.
Risk of missing players’ actions if the camera fails to record properly.

Looker metrics

Looker is a big analytics and business intelligence tool used by Hudl to create data visualizations. From the metrics collected, I found details related to

Trends of highlight creation on a monthly and yearly basis in the sports season and in months where it's mostly the training period.
The fact that Hudl original reels are viewed more than Hudl & User produced.

Affinity Mapping

I used this mapping process to organize related ideas into groups so that I could identify patterns and themes. This helped to capture the essence of the ideas within it as well as to identify gaps in my research or any new directions left to explore.

From the diagram below, the patterns I identified were:

Current working scenarios
Necessary to be included/considered
Possible improvements
User actions
Important points to be noted
Related to the Flex camera
Positive feedback
Negative feedback
Data Metrics
Future aspects

Figure- Affinity mapping

Competitive Analysis

Competitors that are taken into account were Veo, Trace, InStat, and Reeplayer. Each of the competitors has great approaches to enhance the highlights feature for players and coaches to use.

From the competitive analysis following points have been uncovered:

What was found to be common

A simple direct UI to create highlights.
Good software for creating highlights, especially for soccer.
Customizable styling features for creating a highlight are ideal and easy.
Easy setup to use and record videos.
The download feature is something found to be shared among competitors.
Downloading and sharing highlights are free of cost.

What was found to be different

Additional features like bookmarking, tags, and different ways of saving highlights are being used by different companies.
A manual to help a new user understand how to create/edit/ share a highlight/reel.
Camera quality to record the footage & detection technology in order to construct great highlights.
Saving the highlights in proper spaces is a plus point in terms of organization.
Different customizable features for highlight videos.

Research Interviews

During interviewing three Hudl employees (Hudlies), I discussed highlights from a broad perspective, how Hudl is completing highlights now and in the future, as well as other aspects of club soccer highlights.

Who are the users?

A Senior Director in the Fan Team who works at the Competitive level managing Hudl studios.

A curated programming manager on the Fan Team who works in Hudl Studios.

A Hudl Studios Content Intern on the Fan Team who has been working on club soccer highlights.

Key Insights

Challenges dealing with analyzing soccer games in all playing seasons are present.
Criteria for prioritization of different users like parents, players, coaches, fans, college recruiters, teammates, other families, and friends.
Different kinds of users view content/highlights in different ways.
Flex can help create a lot of data for highlights with video quality.
Need work in the data section of managing highlights.
The quality of the highlights created for club soccer is vital.
Importance of Auto-generated highlights for users and Hudl.
Rooster data lacking verification, especially for club soccer players causing problems in creating highlights.
Fan team's approach to creating highlights.
Flex can create an impact on highlights by collecting the right data from the users.

Focus Flex's impact on highlights and videos

Pros

The camera is a huge help, especially at the club level.
Increasing the number of cameras will result in more games, more recordings, and more content.
Flex can sometimes help to capture good highlights.
Flex + Assist = good data + accurate rooster in the creation of highlights.
Flex will assist in solving data problems for club soccer games

Cons

Camera angles can be a problem like trouble in covering the whole soccer field.
Identifying players during a match would be a difficult task as jersey numbers are not visible.
Flex camera's video quality and its effect in different weather conditions.
In order to have a clear view of the team and the player scoring, there is no zoom-in on the camera while it is recording.

Data Metrics

Internal Hudl data metrics were needed to further understand how highlights play a crucial role in content creation. This is because highlights create significant opportunities for players to make every moment count.

I evaluated various data metrics graphics around topics such as the weekly number of highlights created, the weekly number of highlights created year over year, the weekly number of highlights created by sport, content type, etc.

All of these metrics were taken into account to comprehend the rate of highlights creation by users in general and for the soccer sport as well. Below are some of the metrics that helped to collect different types of data.

Figure- Month vs Highlights count on weekly basis of highlights creation by content type

Figure- Both the graphs talk about weekly views and number of reel/highlights as per content and sport type

The below data graphs talk about the other types of users: registered and unregistered on Hudl on various platforms which are android & ios applications plus desktop & mobile browsers. The Hudl Fan team relies on this data to evaluate user traffic and improve viewing rates of highlights.

Metrics on unregistered users on different platforms

Figure- Metrics on which users- registered & non-registered watch highlights through different interfaces & platforms

Conclusion

The entire internal research study was completed within the specified timeframe and proved to be very helpful for the team with the following key findings:

Key Takeaways

Learned how highlights are created in great detail.
A deeper view of how Hudl highlights could involve Flex in analyzing the effectiveness of using these highlights in the coaching and training process.
Observed how Hudl and other camera-video recording companies work with highlights.
A better understanding of how content is classified in a company managing users.
Identified the users for whom highlights are significant and how they use them.
Outreach of creating content feed & highlights on the Hudl Platform.
Taking note of how Flex can help the Fan Team manage highlights.
Understanding how flex can help create & improve highlights.
Getting an overview of types of users who access highlights.
Having a solid understanding of how important video quality is to create highlights.

Learnings

As my first user research study in a real-world scenario, I was delighted to be able to apply the results to real-world problems. As I went through the entire process, I learned a lot. Trying to put into practice what I learned in school, creating a proper research plan, obtaining help from other designers, and verifying my process to complete it successfully as requested by my project manager, I have evolved as a UX researcher.

A major challenge was collecting and analyzing data on how coaches and players use Hudl highlights to identify improvement areas and make game strategy decisions. This was accomplished by reading past Hudl Sync articles and watching and reading other interviews.

In addition, a well-designed study methodology and a clear research questionnaire were essential.

Overall, this internal research revealed valuable insights into how the company's technology helps players and coaches improve their performance. Hudl's focus cameras play a very important role in accomplishing the same goal.

Thank You for reading!

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