RecruitHER Capstone Project

Project Date: May 2024-Fall 2024

My Role: Content & Design Lead

Project Overview:

RecruitHER is designed to level the playing field by offering an intuitive, user-friendly solution that supports multiple sports on a national scale. We empower high school female athletes by providing a central location to seek recruitment opportunities and connect with coaches, recruiters, and scouts.

Throughout our user research, we identified key features that align with our mission to highlight female athletes. We used design elements such as Canva, Figma, WordPress, and Adobe Illustrator to curate our ideas behind RecruitHER.

The Problem:

Despite the growing success of women in sports, many talented athletes still struggle to be discovered by recruiters and coaches. There are very few recruitment platforms available to address the unique challenges and visibility issues for female athletes. Despite making up approximately 44% of college athletes, women still experience a disparity in opportunities and recruitment in sports. Additionally, women’s sports only receive only 4% of media coverage, compared to 96% for men’s sports, which further limits the visibility of female athletes.

There are three major gaps in traditional recruitment methods that we wanted to address:

1. Lack of equal visibility: Traditional recruitment platforms often prioritize male athletes, giving them greater visibility due to biases and the prominence of male-dominated sports. Because of this, female athletes struggle to gain attention and connect with coaches and recruiters.
2. Fragmented showcasing opportunities: Female athletes must rely on fragmented tools for highlights, stats, and communication with no cohesive platform tailored to their needs.
3. Limited interactivity and social engagement: They also lack interactive features for real-time engagement or opportunities to showcase their achievements and events in a dynamic, shareable format, making the recruitment process feel impersonal and inaccessible.

Throughout our user testing, interviews confirmed that athletes rely on multiple platforms and struggle with managing and obtaining necessary resources, reinforcing the need for a unified solution. Athletes believe that it is difficult to get access to coaches’ contact information and place a high value on engaging directly with them.

The Solution:

Step 1: Competitive Research

Throughout our research, we found that platforms such as NCSA, StateChamps, and Between the Lines Sports each provided resources for these athletes, but there is a severe lack of user-friendly, interactive features for each platform. Athletes also rely heavily on their social media presence to market themselves but fall short when trying to get closer to coaches.

During our user testing, we concluded that a comprehensive recruitment platform specifically focused on direct communication and engagement with recruiters, coaches, and scouts would increase visibility and efficiency for athletes, as well as recruiters, coaches, and scouts.

Step 2: Testing our Prototype

Before creating our prototype in Figma, we wanted to summarize the main points that define and support our Unique Value Proposition:

1. Communication & Visibility
2. Event Sharing & Simplicity

As shown below, our prototype included features such as:

• Customized, Detailed Player Profiles
• Direct Messaging with Coaches
• Event sharing capabilities
• Advanced Statistics
• Featured Athlete Page
• Notification Alerts

Homepage and Player Profile for RecruitHER

Direct Messaging and Notifications for RecruitHER

We used our prototype to start on our Alpha and our Beta.

Step 3: Web Design

Alpha 33% — We transitioned our prototype into our website using WordPress. This included adding our home, contact, featured athlete, and member creation/login pages. We heavily relied on our design system to create our patterns, buttons, and forms. We used images of athletes in motion to appeal to our target audience. During this portion, we decided to only focus on three sports: Basketball, Softball, and Volleyball

Alpha 66% — Upgraded our theme to Business Plan so there would be more customization feature options available to us. We also implemented a secure, user-friendly login page for athletes and recruiters. The profile setup page was creative with a comprehensive form for athletes to input personal details, provide sport-specific stats, share academic achievements, and upload highlights. This profile page is linked to our fully built-out player profile page featuring a profile picture, header, stats, photo gallery, and detailed events. Our athlete profile search page was created to allow athletes to be searched by name.

Alpha 99% — Refined some of our key features such as expanding our Athlete Database functionality and adding more features to our player profile. Some of the challenges we aimed to fix included implementing a hover effect for our buttons, fixing headers and footers to be more aesthetically pleasing to the site, and implementing more plugins to center and design our forms and pages. I also started to focus on implementing better ways to display stats, so I used a chart plugin to show statistical averages per season.

Throughout our Alpha and with feedback from classmates, we decided to make design iterations to our website to give it a more modern touch and appeal to our youthful audience.

Beta 33% and 66% — Added a direct messaging feature using the Better Messages plugin. Used a YouTube API Key to create a functional video playlist for the athlete highlights. Since social media is a pivotal part of the recruiting process, we added a social media feed using a social feed plugin. We also added a calendar with a list of recruitment dates to the homepage.

Beta 100% — Completed the development of most of RecruitHER’s features and identity to help us prep for our future user testing. Some of our enhancements included optimizing the platform for mobile use, revamping the profile pages with more plugins to enhance interactivity, and updating the homepage with a sleeker graphic header and dynamic imagery showcasing players more refreshingly and professionally that resonates with our target audience.

The Results:

So far, the development for RecruitHER has progressed thoughtfully and strategically, with a strong emphasis on both the technical and user-experience aspects of the platform. Here is a summary of the results before heading into further testing:

• Defined Core Purpose and Vision
• Developed Key Features
• Implemented Strategic Design Choices
• Reflection and Adaptability

Our core functionalities and backend structure are in place. The focus remained on keeping everything visually polished while refining user input methods, performance metrics, and potential coach/scout/recruiter interactions.

The platform is well-positioned to enter further testing as a promising tool that could significantly impact the recruitment process for high school female athletes.