Catapult Sports
Portal
Portal was an experimental product concept created to transform how sports coaches and analysts interact with game footage. The vision was to allow users to search and pinpoint key moments within recordings using data from trusted third-party sources. This approach aimed to remove hours of manual scrubbing and make one of the most time-consuming parts of performance analysis faster and more efficient.
Although Portal was never released to the public, I led the early product discovery and design efforts that shaped its MVP. I began by analyzing the existing video interface and gathered insights from Mixpanel analytics, session recordings, and interviews with stakeholders. This research uncovered several critical challenges.
Coaches struggled to locate specific plays or moments, often spending long periods manually searching through full recordings. The dashboard layout was cluttered and unintuitive, which made navigation difficult and slowed access to key data. The interface design was not responsive, forcing users to scroll sideways without clear visual indicators, especially on mobile devices. Important details such as timestamps, play markers, and last update times were either hidden or missing, which caused confusion and increased the number of support inquiries.
After consolidating these findings, I created a requirements document and built a flow chart to illustrate the ideal user journey through the redesigned interface. My proposed solution emphasized speed, clarity, and responsiveness. It featured a search-driven approach, intuitive tagging and visual markers, real-time update indicators, and a cleaner visual hierarchy tailored for both desktop and mobile experiences.
While Portal ultimately remained an internal concept, this work provided a strong blueprint for how video and data could work together to deliver a more intuitive experience for sports organizations. It also set the foundation for future experimentation with performance video analysis within the company.
I partnered closely with our UX designer to design a streamlined experience that allowed users to quickly search for specific moments within games and compile those clips into custom collections. Through customer interviews, I learned that video coordinators and coaches needed a faster, more intuitive way to create these collections so they could efficiently review and analyze key plays from previous games.
While each video coordinator had their own approach, their ultimate goal was consistent: to isolate and review critical moments. I focused on simplifying their workflows while still giving them flexibility in how they organized content. The redesigned interface allowed users to search for clips, add them to collections, and include pre-roll and post-roll segments, giving coaches valuable context such as player formations, sets, and ball placement before and after each play.
When I demoed the prototype for users, their response was overwhelmingly positive. They saw it as a major step forward from the previous interface, praising the improved navigation, streamlined workflows, and overall usability. Although Portal was never released to the public, these demos validated the concept and confirmed its potential to significantly improve the way sports organizations analyze video content.