Coach's Eye by TechSmith Corporation

Role: Lead Product Designer 

Responsibilities

About Coach's Eye

Coach’s Eye is the world's leading video analysis app, for iOS, Android and Windows Universal. It enables athletes at all levels to record, analyze and improve their technique with powerful video analysis that was previously only available to professional athletes.

With a powerful cloud backend, Coach’s Eye enables teams to record their athletes and easily distribute analysis videos to their entire roster.

History

In 2011, TechSmith began its first major mobile product development by beginning work on Coach’s Eye. I had the honor of being selected as the designer for the small, skunkworks team that initially began research, design and development for the app. After 3 months, we had the initial release completed and shipped in the app store, receiving rave reviews and forever since dominating the sports deck.

For the last 5 years, I’ve focused an enormous amount of my energy on further developing and refining the app, along with my design teammates, Joseph Dearman and Pablo Contreras. For us, it’s been a collaborative labor of love and we couldn’t be more proud of the mark it’s left on the world of sports and athleticism.

My Role & Contributions

One of the benefits of being on a small team is that you get to wear a LOT of hats. Over the years, I have been able to contribute in numerous ways.

Primarily, my responsibilities were focused on the workflow, interaction and visual design of the app itself. However, the highly collaborative and tight knit nature of the team allowed me to also work on marketing efforts, sales efforts, enormous amounts of product research and countless other tasks.

In close collaboration with Joseph Dearman, we’ve gone through an enormous amount of iteration based on feedback, usage analytics and ethnographic research. We’ve had the opportunity to directly observe the athletic development challenges ranging from young athletes all the way to olympians and extreme sports. I never imagined that I’d be working on an app that would be such a critical tool for so many athletes at so many levels.

Simply Powerful

The first challenge when designing Coach’s Eye was how we could enable rich video manipulation, while minimizing the amount of interaction necessary and keeping learning to a minimum.

This is where the “Flywheel” comes in. The first of its kind, though imitated repeatedly by competitors, the Flywheel enabled richer video analysis than ever seen before. Simple slow motion playback is powerful for being able to watch movement mechanics organically. But the Flywheel enables a degree of analog control that empowers users to control the video at whatever speed they feel and laser in on insights faster than ever before.

Professional Analysis For Anyone

Combined with the advanced drawing tools and the ability to record analysis sessions to share later, Coach’s Eye became an astoundingly powerful video analysis tool for users of any experience level. Users of any age or any technical background could pick the app up and start spinning the wheel, immediately grasping how to use the app to analyze like a professional.

Gallery

Organization & Sharing In One

Heavy users of Coach's Eye have libraries of hundreds of videos. They will work with many athletes, providing individual training and utilizing video analysis to ensure their coaching sinks in.

We needed a video library that reflected the needs of our coaches.

• Shared lockers to easily send videos to teams or individual athletes.
• Easy and powerful tagging to make footage location a breeze.
• An efficient workflow that puts analysis and sharing in the forefront.

Efficiency

When you're dealing with live performances, you don't always know when the right time to get the footage will be. At competitions, athletes can't wait for you to get your camera ready. In the gym, you don't have time to mess around with your phone when you are coaching multiple athletes. You need a camera that will work simply and quickly.

GoPro Integration

Do you really want to take your phone out on the ice, or put it in the goal to get the perfect angle? We didn't think so. That's why you can remotely record from GoPro cameras with a quick tap of a button.

Organization When You Need It

Get all the shots you want, organize them quickly afterwards. With immediate team sharing capability, the Coach's Eye camera streamlines the entire footage acquisition and distribution process.

Keeping Sharing Simple

We never want users to have to figure out how to navigate our mental models in order to achieve their tasks. Our sharing workflow was designed with that philosophy in mind. We put what users are looking for front and center. Simple sharing options, quickly accessible, with a powerful cloud backend to ensure quality and reliability.