Designing a Scholastic Sports Messaging App for Fast Adoption
Aktivate 0-to-1 Mobile Messaging App Design
Sole product designer on a 0-to-1 mobile messaging app for school sports. Leadership bet on a parent-first launch, however research pointed towards athletic directors and coaches being the priority. I designed for the chosen plan, while preparing and advocating for coaches and ADs each cycle. The coach and AD features shipped within a few cycles and drove growth from 30 to 300+ teams in a year.
Project Details
Client
Aktivate
Team
Me; third-party vendor for research; engineering team of three (two frontend, one backend); rotating PM (three changes)
Role
In-house Product Designer
Scope
Research: vendor management, workshop facilitation, product discovery, usability testing, synthesis. UX/UI Design: design system, user flows, prototyping, high fidelity interface designs
Timeline
2021-2023
The Problem
The existing Aktivate web platform handled school sports registration and compliance, but it had no mobile-friendly way for coaches, parents, and students to manage those tasks. Teams were also using various third-party apps to communicate, with no consistency or connection between them.
Aktivate wanted to build a mobile app to close both gaps, but the priority was fast adoption and a path to monetization. The bet was in-app advertising aimed at parents, so the first release focused on team messaging. But parents only joined when a coach invited them, and coaches already had other ways to message their teams. To reach parents, the app first had to give coaches a reason to switch.
The path to revenue ran through parents, which meant getting them into the app before coaches and athletic directors had what they needed.
Impact
Adoption accelerated as later releases closed the gaps that research flagged. Registration status and emergency contacts gave coaches and athletic directors a reason to bring their teams in, and features like Spanish language support made the app usable for families who'd been left out.
30 to 300+
teams and clubs using the app, one year after beta
~5,000
users (ADs, coaches, students, parents), one year after beta
What I Did and Why
As the sole product designer on the mobile app, I designed the user flows and the design system behind the interface, and built prototypes for sales pitches. I worked with engineering and go-to-market teams across five release cycles.
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To build personas across multiple stakeholder groups, we brought in a vendor for foundational research. I set the journey stages they studied and approved their interview questions. As we moved into feature research and usability testing, I worked more closely with them, co-writing questions and running my own tests. Throughout, I synthesized the research and cut highlight reels so that the rest of the company could act on it.
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From the persona and journey mapping research and our own discovery interviews with athletic directors and coaches, the product team recommended launching with ADs and coaches first, the people who decided which tools their schools used, leading with registration status. Leadership chose the parent-focused launch instead, so I designed for that plan while pushing for what coaches and ADs needed with each release.
Key Findings and What Changed
Each release closed a gap that was keeping coaches from bringing their teams in, or keeping families from sticking around once they joined.
INSIGHT:
Coaches checked each athlete's registration and eligibility throughout the season, and could only do it by logging into the desktop platform. Putting that data in the app gave coaches a recurring reasons to open it.
DECISION:
I designed a minimal roster table with only what coaches needed at a glance: athlete name, grade, registration status. Tapping a row expands it to show what's complete and what's missing. Status updates in real time from the main platform.
RESULT:
Coaches could check eligibility for tryouts and team placement on the spot, and tell athletes exactly what they still needed, without returning to a desktop.
INSIGHT:
During practices and games, coaching staff had no fast way to reach an athlete's guardian in an emergency. Some staff carried binders of printed athlete information, a security risk if it fell into the wrong hands.
DECISION:
I tied emergency contacts directly to each athlete's directory profile and linked them to their verified guardian. For the first launch, the backend couldn't connect the directory to the registration data, so the two athlete lists remained separate. Merging them was added to the roadmap, but we chose to ship this feature first because it gave coaches an immediate reason to use the app.
RESULT:
Coaches had guardian contacts in the app, without digging through binders or logging into the desktop platform.
INSIGHT:
During beta, we heard about real incidents of peer bullying and inappropriate adult-to-minor communication on other messaging apps. That made compliance a risk we needed to address early if we wanted athletic directors to approve the app.
DECISION:
As a first step, the team gave athletic directors the ability to download all communication logs, instead of building a custom admin-level permission tier. We also separated channels into "students + coach," "guardians + coach," and a one-to-many announcements channel for the coach. Each channel had content flagging for language and images.
RESULT:
Athletic directors gained oversight other messaging apps lacked, giving schools a reason to approve this app.
INSIGHT:
As the app expanded beyond beta, many schools turned out to have large Spanish-speaking populations, and for those families the app was unusable.
DECISION:
For the first release, the app matched each user's phone language setting, so families saw Spanish-language by default without having to change anything. We planned to add in-app language settings and additional languages in future cycles.
RESULT:
Families who'd been left out could use the app, which was critical for reaching the most parents, the audience that the business model depended on.
What I Learned
We made both a user case and a business case for starting with coaches and athletic directors, since they were the ones who chose which tools their schools used. But we led with the user case, and it was competing against a revenue model leadership was already leaning toward. The features we'd recommended came back within a few releases, once usability testing showed they were needed before anything else, but the detour cost time, money, and early trust.
I learned to frame research as costs and risks, not just user needs, so leadership can make better bets earlier.