Felicia F

An athlete’s compass

Personalised paths for career transition

— CLIENT

Metacampus

— ROLE

UX designer

— PROJECT TYPE

April 2024 – Aug 2024 (remote)

Summary

At Metacampus, a Barcelona-based innovation company in web3, blockchain, and AI, I joined a project that focused on the real struggles athletes face when transitioning from their sports careers. Partnering with Athlete Career Transition (ACT), we discovered that many athletes experience isolation and anxiety, feeling unmoored without the structure they’ve always known. As a UX designer, my mission was to create a platform that guides them through this change, helping them define their goals and explore new career paths.

From our athletes stories and ACT, we built a platform beta offering personalised learning paths and fostered confidence. In our beta, 80% reported feeling better prepared for their next steps, and 71% showed interest in subscribing, indicating that our platform is getting there to making a meaningful difference in helping athletes navigate their uncertain futures.

A unique user group

So, industry wise I was in a quite familiar situation. I've worked with products focused on recruitment, human resources and even learning to certain extent. But company constellation? Completely new. Metacampus being a start-up with investing rounds and the importance of the work together with ACT was something we, as a team, were conscious about and definitely shaped the project.


I'm not alone with the perception of start-ups sometimes being portrayed as somewhat unstable, unpredictable and a lot of work. There's also those nightmares cases, but that's another story. In my case, the unpredictability, the pace, the hat with different roles lead to next level learnings and growth for me as a designer.


First of all, what intrigued me was the nisch of user group, former athletes.

Also, the founders, our client and stakeholders themselves being once in their shoes created an even stronger personal connection and sentiment towards the mission and product vision.


An athletes journey is rather unique, devoted with passion but also short.

Many start with no secondary education and when it is all over it may have been everything you've done until then, professionally and personally. Therefore, loss of identity and depression is common after effects, adding that studies show that former athletes with depression is as high as 39%. 😕


You may have planned your retirement more calmly or it happened suddenly, but either way the start into the business world can feel confusing and daunting, more often that not being clueless of what you could be doing next or how your abilities could be useful.

I mean, I wrote my first resume for my summer job and from there it's been a couple of iterations, cover letter and portfolio work. So, it's like brushing my teeth.

From the information I gathered from the founders in the beginning, most of the athletes they've worked with had never written a resume in their life before.

Needless to say, in difficult life situations, we humans tend to isolate and/or feel like we are alone when it's far from true.

Hypotethical personas created with the team to enhance awareness and understanding of our athletes




A packed product vision

When they involved me in the project, they had already "unpacked" the product vision in something similar to a sitemap. Also, they wanted to release a complete platform in approximately 3 months. Having in mind that we would be a team of three, me, the tech lead and a product manager that was at the same time creating the extended business process for ACT. Sounds familiar, fellow designers?


With that said, it was me and the tech lead setting the communication processes, prioritizations and limitations. For me, the fastest way to see how much was possible to do, was to take this sitemap and create key user flows and wireframes based on these when I've got a thumbs up I was on the right track.






Understanding beyond the navigational structure


We knew that emphasis needed to be on the pages before logged in to the village, for athletes to understand the purpose and value it offers them based on the situation they are in. Finding the right balance is always a struggle, some would probably want more information and others don't. Also, I had to have in mind what could be the potential patterns and interactions leading to conversion, in these case subscriptions.

Personally? I wanted to take this opportunity to dig deeper into our athletes brains and their needs since this was my first opportunity to actually talk to them.


Create account, fill in their profile and finding a course was the next part we wanted them to try out and share their thoughts.


The insights we took action upon:


👉 They reacted positively when getting options on what they would like to learn and what goal(s) they had. If they wanted to find a job, learn or up skill, entrepreneurship or connect with athletes. Setting a goal and reach this with coaching and guiding was something familiar for them.


👉 They highlighted the importance of hearing about former athletes experiences with ACT and how their journey was. If a certain service, such as a course or a set of different tasks lead them to find that new opportunity.


👉 Once again, they mentioned that they feel lost in what next steps could be, even who they are and what they could like. How are these choices i've made here on the profile creation going to help me later?




So for our beta version, after some low effort high win changes, we decided to put most of our effort into giving athletes that needs more support the opportunity to:


Be able to follow a provided personalised learning and development plan besides their job seeking activities and learning.


It is great informing about what's in it for an athlete to subscribe and getting more sign ups, but we believed above functionality, along with other such as relevant courses and jobs, would encourage athletes to sign up for a paid membership in the long run which is our goal and where we would get our ROI from in the end.



Landing pages and profile creation

Landing pages & creation of profile sketches

Losing grip of all versions

While focusing on creating the flow for the personalised learning plan, I had other todo’s where some were important and some less. Being a start-up, wearing many hats is not just a saying. I was not alone of course. I had a copywriter that, unfortunately was not properly introduced to the project and to the concept from early stages.

In parallel, I was also working with a UI designer who worked a couple of hours/week to finalise the sketches while I was user testing, keeping in mind that things could change but starting with setting the navigational structure, main components, typography and the branding itself.


That meant that I had a page with approved sketches for our copywriter to work from and another page for UI work.

When things and opinions changed, which it obviously did, it meant three places had to be updated, and let us say, it was making me go completely nuts.

Another side effect was that we tended to have a lot of text where, in my opinion, was not necessary which took a lot of space and attention from our user risking that other more important actions could be missed. This is critical to handle well on the landing and on the dashboard pages.


So for us all to be on the same page (pun intended) this is what I decided to do:


👉 Weekly meeting with UI Designer, Copywriter and Tech Lead

👉 Worked on the same project and page in Figma, I had a separate page for WIP/ not approved designs

👉 Added new changes on our Monday board, link attached to design


🎯 Make sure changes or add-ons had a or could have a high value for the product at this first stage, and if not wait until the beta version gets in the hands of our athletes. This is certainly a team effort, whereas I and my product owner were bearers of the decision in discussion with our client.

Shaping the athlete’s first steps


With some unnecessary distractions removed, I started mapping out an user flow for the changes to the creation of the profile and the flow for the personalised plan in order to communicate it as fast as possible for the whole team and our client. When we all agreed it could be done, I started sketching out the flow directly into the UI, since we were all working on this stage already and the implementation of the foundations of the platform was being built as we speak.


Some important changes worth mentioning is that we were thinking of having them fill in a full job profile process and gather information about their goals, interest and abilities after log in.

From what our athletes told us, having them to fill in this much information leaves them wondering why certain information would be beneficial to add at this stage or perhaps at all.

We'd like them to understand what we offer more deeply but also feel more prone to add as much information as possible from the start.


So we made it obligatory, but we shortened it to add their most recent experience, personal information and if they wanted to be visible for other athletes and recruiters.



For the personalised learning plan these are the main features:


👉 Learning plan is created based on your profile, situation, strenghts, goals and interests


👉 Three stages, where what you choose in the first stage defines next stage learning content



👉 Content would be in form of quizzes, videos and courses



👉 Rewards in terms of points and badges (this will eventually be added to a leaderboard where also fellow athletes progress will show)



A beta version, my final destination

Okay, we have the key flows in place, content and copy finalised, and we’re going full speed on promoting and launching the platform across every possible channel to reach athletes.

The goal is for them to view the static information pages, understand our offerings, and sign up for prioritised access to the platform at no cost.


This approach allows us to control the number of users entering the beta and iterate effectively on the design.


That said, we’re cautious not to respond to just any feedback without direction. Our long-term goal is 8 million active, returning users by 2028.

To achieve this, the platform must offer athletes valuable new job opportunities, knowledge, and personal growth.

In this first stage, we want to see if our development roadmap supports—and ideally, drives—this outcome.


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Real sweet learnings

So, to summarise in a few key takeaways.


  1. 1. I know this in my core, but in the rush to understand the product, their vision, and the business, while rapidly sketching concepts, I overlooked involving our copywriter early in the process. This was made easier by the fact that we were a completely new team, working remotely with limited touch points overall.


A start-up meeting to establish responsibilities, workflows, and communication could have set a stronger foundation.



  1. 2. Our partners had a solid understanding of their users, pain points, and the current state of the business. They also had a clear vision—but it was understandably high-level. While this seemed like an ideal setup, it posed challenges because the detailed solutions were left entirely to us. Without much time to think outside the box, I found myself balancing rapid idea generation and wireframing, sometimes with loosely defined content, while seeking feedback to clarify the purpose and flow.

  2. This experience also raised a key question for me: how much does it matter if the business strategy is developed in parallel with the product?
  3. I've realised I have become a much more flexible designer.