Training athletes, not data scientists
An ambitious project to design the Catapult One (C1) player experience helping amateur athletes understand their data as they aspire to become professional sports players in their field.
🧢 My Team
Chief of Product - Michael
Director of Marketing - Carter
Tech Lead - Chris
Global Head of User Experience - John
Sr. User Experience Design - Me
🙋♂️ My Role
Researcher, Product Designer, Strategist
Construct the next logical path for Catapult One’s user experience, aiding in the transition from legacy Playertek APIs to Catapult’s new cloud platform. This includes defining a scalable interaction model that supports future feature growth while ensuring continuity for existing users.
🗓️ My Timeframe
Q1 → Q2
This work is planned for completion across Q1 and Q2, allowing sufficient time for research, mapping, and iterative UX development. By spreading the effort across both quarters, we ensure a smooth transition from legacy Playertek APIs to the new Catapult cloud platform without disrupting existing user workflows.
00 Introduction
What is Catapult One?
Catapult One is a sports performance tracking system designed for individual athletes and coaches, especially in team sports like soccer, American football, rugby, and lacrosse. It brings elite-level analytics—once reserved for pro teams—into the hands of everyday players.
GPS Tracking Pod & Vest: Athletes wear a FIFA-approved pod and vest to capture movement data during training or matches.
Performance Metrics: Tracks key stats like total distance, sprint distance, top speed, and intensity to help players improve.
Heatmaps & Positioning: Visualizes player movement to analyze field coverage and tactical positioning.
Training Plans: Offers curated workouts and recovery tips from top-tier coaches.
Progress Analysis: Lets users benchmark against personal bests and monitor trends over time.
TLDR; When you play your sport you get numbers and graphs
What does this information mean for the end user?
01 Business Need
Playertek is transition to the Catapult One app with a full rebrand. As part of the effort we want to ensure long‑term an upgraded user experience to the athletes and scale our direct to consumer reach
Consolidates legacy functionality into a modern, fully supported platform
Delivers improved performance, richer insights, and a more intuitive UX
Reduces maintenance costs while future‑proofing the athlete and coach ecosystem
Opportunities
The transition to a fully rebranded Catapult One app unlocks key user‑experience opportunities that elevate athlete engagement and long‑term value.
Strengthening athlete retention with a more consistent, accessible, and future‑ready mobile experience
Enhancing data clarity and insight delivery through modernized visual design and interaction patterns
Streamlining fragmented Playertek workflows into a unified, intuitive end‑to‑end experience
Challenges
02 Design Project Setup
Using the double‑diamond method creates clear alignment, structured decision‑making, and predictable momentum throughout the project.
Clarifies the problem space through open exploration, research, and early requirement definition
Sharpens direction by defining a focused vision and validating it before execution
Drives efficient delivery with a structured path from kickoff to final, user‑ready outcomes
We applied the double‑diamond method to create clear alignment, structured decision‑making, and predictable momentum across the entire project lifecycle, ensuring both the team and stakeholders moved forward with shared clarity and purpose.
We clarified the problem space through open exploration, user research, and early requirement definition, giving us a grounded understanding of what athletes and coaches truly needed.
We sharpened direction by defining a focused product vision and validating it with users and stakeholders before committing to execution.
We drove efficient delivery by following a structured path from kickoff to final, user‑ready outcomes, ensuring the team stayed aligned, unblocked, and consistently moving toward a high‑quality release.
Double Diamond
03 Research & Discovery
Catapult One identify opportunities to present performance insights more clearly and create a more modern, athlete‑centric visual identity.
To understand the visual design conventions athletes already recognize and trust, allowing Catapult One to strategically differentiate while still maintaining intuitive, low‑friction navigation and a polished, professional aesthetic.
Contextual Inquiry
To observe real athlete behavior in context, helping uncover how users actually interact with their training data and devices—insights that inform more intuitive flows in the Catapult One app.
To identify unspoken needs, workarounds, and pain points that athletes or coaches may not articulate in interviews, allowing Catapult One to solve real‑world friction that competitors overlook.
To understand the environment and conditions of use, ensuring Catapult One’s design supports quick interpretation, minimal cognitive load, and seamless usability during training sessions, matches, or post‑game review.
Persona Validation
Persona validation ensures our athlete and coach profiles accurately reflect real training behaviors and decision‑making patterns, allowing the Catapult One app’s visual design and data presentation to align with how users naturally interpret performance insights.
By validating personas with actual users, we confirm that our interface, navigation, and visual hierarchy support authentic needs rather than assumptions, resulting in a product that feels intuitive, relevant, and purpose‑built for the people who rely on it.
Competitors
04 UX Requirements
Stuff about design discovery here
Opportunities
Challenge here
Black Friday Ready
05 Design Production
Mobile first
Much of our design system had been created for in house B2B products that sports scientists used for coaching and tactical applications. The challenge was expanding this system so that we could accomodate a mobile first B2C products for iOS and Android. React native allows us plenty of affordances to move code for mobile. Since the design system was young it rested on the ability to port desktop first components.
New devices, new states
One of the key experiences in C1 was the support for new and legacy devices. As part of this we had to capture multiple states for the devices when they were in use on the product
New support for sports modes & scheduling
As devices were capable of supporting multi sports modes we had to adjust our navigation to support a broader range of activities for different athletes
Leaderboards for social interaction
This feature required the creation of a ranking system for athletes much like ‘local legends’ on other popular workout activity apps to help appeal to athletes that wanted and extra dose of competition with their teammates.
06 Outcomes
Stuff about design discovery here
Opportunities
Challenge here