Bringing parents into Hudl for the first time — and rebuilding the foundation underneath them

The Challenge

A new user type, a mental model shift, and two apps becoming one

Parents had always been adjacent to Hudl — watching games, chasing highlights — but never had a product built for them. Launching one was also the moment to fix two problems that had been building for years.

• 1Define and validate an MVP for parents — groundwork for an untapped revenue line
• 2Consolidate two overlapping apps into one, delisting the duplicate and cutting its engineering overhead
• 3Fix a year-old navigation and information architecture problem across the whole platform

• 1

  Two apps, one job

  Parents bounced between two apps to get the full picture of their athlete's season — and sensed there was more content in Hudl's main app than in the fan app built for them. Consolidation mattered as much as any new screen.

• 2

  A navigation problem a year in the making

  Discovery kept surfacing a mental-model problem that had been flagged a year earlier and never prioritized. Going back through feedback from coaches, athletes, and admins made the case that this was a platform-wide fix, not a parent one-off.

• 3

  Turning feedback into signal

  A pipeline on top of in-app comments used AI-assisted text analysis to sort raw feedback into recurring themes, feeding a sentiment dashboard segmentable by cohort. It replaced anecdotes with a repeatable check on whether new work addressed what parents cared about most.

  
• 4

  What parents were running into

  Parents expected far more video than existed. Teams were hard to find, pushing people into workarounds just to follow their own kid. Location and favorite teams weren't shaping what anyone saw first. And every team profile looked the same — what the team started calling "profile blindness."

• 5

  Not breaking it for everyone else

  The legacy app wasn't only for parents: coaches analyzed games there and recruiters browsed player profiles. Every change had to serve parents without quietly breaking those other jobs.

• 6

  Built to learn fast

  With so much unproven, the alpha was instrumented to learn quickly. For parent-facing features, that meant an AI-forward discovery loop — production-fidelity prototypes, updated live on calls with families.

• 1

  Ship the alpha, then let it teach you

  Instead of fully scoping the product up front, get a real version in front of real families early and treat the alpha as the primary research tool.

• 2

  Fix the foundation once

  Rebuilding navigation is disruptive, so it had to happen deliberately and once — designed to hold for parents and every existing role, not patched around the new addition.

• 3

  Design the seams for monetization, don't build it yet

  A future subscription shaped how flows and permissions were structured, without committing to paywalls or pricing before there was evidence of what parents would pay for.

• 4

  Prototype in code, polish in code

  AI-forward discovery put production-fidelity prototypes in front of parents, and hands-on design engineering carried polish straight into the codebase instead of a written handoff.

• 5

  Leading beyond this workstream

  The navigation changes reached surfaces this project didn't own, so part of the role was advising other designers to keep the fix consistent. The consolidation strategy was shaped through cross-functional sessions with product, marketing, and engineering — sequencing it around the parent rollout and keeping messaging honest about what shipped when.

"...the data wasn't telling us retention was broken — it was telling us most parents never found the experience in the first place. We weren't fighting a retention problem. We were fighting an activation problem."

• 1

  Activation, not retention

  90% of parents who reached an event page went on to watch video, but only about 6% got there. The product worked; discovery didn't. The next phase became about building activation into the product rather than relying on outside prompts.

• 2

  The post-game moment is the hook

  Email opens ran 42–50% against a 36.9% benchmark, but post-game sends drove about 4.5x the benchmark click-through while other reminders barely moved. That timing became the organizing principle for prompts back into the experience.

• 3

  Parents want to create, not just consume

  Parents wanted to clip, share, and export their athlete's highlights — some were already doing it through desktop workarounds. Creation turned out to be a core reason to come back, not a nice-to-have.

• 4

  Trust before automation

  Automated highlights were in high demand, but a missed moment or mis-tagged athlete undercut confidence in the whole feature. For something this personal, reliability has to clear a high bar first.

• 5

  "Parent" isn't one audience

  Coaches, team admins, and volunteer team managers each shaped adoption differently, with different levels of trust. Outreach and onboarding were rethought around those roles rather than treating every adult around a team the same.

• 1New revenue line: 8,500+ engaged parents and real usage data for a previously untapped user type
• 2Cost efficiency: one app delisted and its separate codebase on the way out, freeing engineering capacity
• 3De-risked investment: demand proven with a 150-parent alpha before committing engineering spend at scale
• 4Platform health: a year-old navigation problem resolved for every role