Spec Sheet
Client
Playkout
Industry
Sports Tech · Entertainment
My Role
UX/UI Designer: Research, Facilitation, Experience Design, Design System, Prototyping
Team
UX Lead · Product Owner · Business Analyst · Tech Lead · Product Designer · Product Designer
Delivarables
Ecosystem Map · Personas · User Journeys · Use Cases · User Flows · Prototype · Product Sheet
Tools
Figma · FigJam · Excel · Lovable · Google Stitch
Project Timeline
3 months
Year
2026
Overview
Playkout arrived with genuine energy and a clear technical capability: a phygital sports experience combining physical pickleball gameplay with digital data capture and interaction. The hardware existed. The potential was visible. But the product didn't yet.
There was no defined user, no prioritized use case, no clear distinction between entertainment, training, and competitive performance. There were multiple possible directions, each with legitimate business potential, and no framework to evaluate them against each other.
This was not an optimization project. It was a definition project , which requires a fundamentally different kind of design thinking.
Problem
The core challenge was not to improve an existing product experience. It was to determine what experience the product should create, for whom, and in what context. That required resisting the pull toward premature solutions and staying in the question longer than was comfortable.
The business had ambitions across three distinct directions , entertainment, performance training, and competitive play , each serving different users with different motivations and different relationships to technology. Building something that tried to serve all three equally would have served none of them well.
The Process
We combined Design Thinking and Agile not as a formula, but as a strategic pairing for this specific challenge. Design Thinking gave us the space to explore broadly and challenge assumptions before committing to a direction. Agile gave us the structure to make incremental progress visible and keep the team aligned across a three-month engagement.
Because direct user research was limited at this stage, we adopted a hypothesis-driven approach, grounding personas, journeys, and use cases in client inputs, market references, and behavioral patterns observed within the sport. Every artifact was framed explicitly as a directional hypothesis, not a validated finding. This honesty about certainty levels was itself a design decision.
Lovable was instrumental during early rapid concept exploration , allowing me to generate and evaluate interaction directions quickly before investing in high-fidelity design, keeping the discovery phase generative rather than convergent too soon.
Decisions
The most consequential decision was to map the Playkout ecosystem before designing any individual experience. The ecosystem, connecting Pro Players, Coaches, and Venue Owners in a data-driven value loop, revealed that Playkout's core proposition was not a sports app. It was an infrastructure for value exchange between three distinct user groups.
That reframe changed everything. It meant that designing for a single player in isolation would miss the most powerful aspects of the product. The coach needed player data to deliver better training. The venue needed usage data to make operational decisions.
The player's progression meant something different depending on whether they were training seriously or playing recreationally. The product needed to serve all of these relationships simultaneously.
Personas
Three player types. Three completely different relationships with the product.
We developed personas across the three primary Playkout user groups , the competitive performance-focused player, the recreational social player, and the coach , each representing a different motivational profile and a different set of expectations from the technology.
The competitive player
The competitive player wants measurable progress. They want to see their shot data, track improvement over time, and know that the system is giving them an accurate picture of their game. For them, the product's credibility depends on data quality and specificity.
The recreational player
The recreational player wants engagement without burden. They're drawn to the novelty of a phygital experience, but they won't tolerate friction , if checking stats requires effort, they won't do it. Their relationship with the product is lighter, and the design has to honor that without making them feel like second-class users.
The coach
The coach occupies a different position entirely: they're not the player, but they're the person who most consistently interprets and acts on the data. Designing for the coach meant designing a context in which player insights were legible, actionable, and delivered at the right moment in a training session.
Artefacts
The prototypes we delivered were explicitly framed as look-and-feel directions, starting points for future development and validation, not final solutions. This framing was intentional. At this stage of the product's life, the most dangerous thing we could have done was present the work with false certainty,
The user flows covered the key experience moments: onboarding, pre-use expectations, in-game interaction, post-use reflection, and potential disengagement. Mapping disengagement explicitly, not just the happy path , surfaced friction points that the team might otherwise have discovered too late.
The Product Sheet consolidated the discovery process into a single accessible reference: value proposition, core features, experience pillars, and the design hypotheses that still needed validation. It became the shared foundation for any future development conversation.
Ecosystem
Use Cases
User Flows
User Journey
Design Kit
Prototypes
Selected screens from the final prototype
Pickleball Machine Gameplay
Tablet Companion
Mobile App
Outcomes & Results
At the end of three months, Playkout had what it didn't have at the beginning: a structured product vision, a defined set of user profiles, a coherent experience direction, and a clear next phase focused on validation with real users.
The discovery work de-risked the development investment and gave the business a language for making product decisions independently.
Lessons
Playkout was the project that most clearly reinforced my understanding of what early-stage product design actually requires. The instinct, for designers, for clients, for everyone in the room, is to move toward solutions. Structure feels like progress. Features feel like answers.
But the most valuable thing we did in this project was resist that pull long enough to understand the ecosystem before we started designing for any part of it. The three months we spent in discovery weren't a delay before the real work. They were the real work.