Making Installation Easy
BACKGROUND
In 2018, Hudl designed the Hudl Focus camera which provided sports teams the ability to film their games and practices without the need of a cameraperson. The camera automatically starts filming and with its auto-tracking technology follows the action of the game, so that the team can watch and analyze it as soon as the game commences.
In 2019, Hudl began manufacturing the cameras to enable more teams across the country to begin recording “hands-free”. As the fleet of cameras increased, the availability of Hudl representatives to assist with the installation became a challenge. I was part of the team that worked to ensure installing the camera was an easy end-to-end process and could be completed in one attempt.
ROLE | DURATION | TEAM
Product Design Manager | Hudl
Jan 2019 - Aug 2019
My team was made up of a product manager, 4 developers, a QA, and a content designer. I also worked closely with members of the Customer Success, Sales, Support and Marketing teams.
THE CHALLENGE
During the first release of Hudl Focus (2018), schools had to wait to have a hard wired/active internet connection in order to check the positioning of the camera on the court. This would require the IT department and the maintenance department of the school to work together to ensure the connection had been established and the firewall was configured so that the maintenance team would just have to hang it on the wall. The installer would then be able to use their phones to see the court on the Hudl Focus app to reposition if necessary.
Unfortunately more times than not, the camera was hung on the wall before the connection was established. This meant that the installer was positioning it blindly since they didn’t have access to see the view of the camera from the app. Once the camera was able to communicate with Hudl, it would typically not be in a favorable position to see the court and the players. This resulted in someone having to go back up the ladder or rent another scissor lift to reposition the camera a day or two later. This was frustrating for everyone involved.
Our goal with this project was to ensure we were staying true to one of the value props of Hudl Focus–that the installation was easy, especially compared to competitors. The way in which we defined success was:
The installer could:
complete installation in one attempt
complete installation without a hardwired internet connection
mount and position the camera without a Hudl account
It would take less than an hour to complete an install from start to finish.
Support interactions would go down from the year the camera was in Beta.
OUR USERS
Maintenance/facility staff members at the school were typically the person called on to install the camera. They usually were between 40-60 years of age, had an older version smartphone, and weren’t the most tech-savvy users. They had long lists of items to get done before the summer ended because once school was in session it was a lot more difficult to work around the kids.
In order to make this a much more seamless process, installers wanted to be confident that they were hanging and positioning the camera correctly during the first attempt so that they didn't waste any time. We knew the process had to be short and easy to understand for a non-technical person.
TECHNICAL CONSTRAINTS IN CONNECTIVITY
We knew that a large part of the success of this project meant being able to complete an installation without an active internet connection. We needed to leverage the technologies that the Focus camera came with and design an experience that allowed users to connect to them easily. My team completed research on both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities to understand the pros and cons of using each (or a combination) from both a user and technical perspective. I created wireframes of each option so that we could test the necessary actions a user would have to take in order to connect to the camera. I also conducted a competitive analysis of other IoT devices to understand patterns our users may be familiar with similar workflows.
After our team reviewed the collective research artifacts, we felt the Wi-Fi only option was the best because we thought it would meet our user’s expectations as well as not introduce additional technical risk. The challenge with this option was that it would force users to go outside of the Hudl Focus app and to the Wi-Fi settings on their phone to select the network. We were worried that our less technical users wouldn’t be able to quickly find the network and navigate back to the app. I decided to test a mid-fidelity prototype (shown in the video below) with people who met some of the demographic criteria of our installers.
RESULTS OF TESTING “WI-FI ONLY” PROTOTYPE
It became pretty clear during testing that users expected to have some sort of overview of what was to come (what installation entailed) before they actually got started.
If we move forward with the Wi-Fi only flow, we should explain why it's necessary to connect to the camera's Wi-Fi. During testing there was some confusion as to what connecting was actually doing.
We may want to be explicit that a password will not be required to connect to the network, as this came up a few times.
Videos during the onboarding process were well received and straightforward to the majority of users.
When asked what they assumed the next steps would entail at the point of the “Fine Tune Your Camera” screen, all users guessed that they would see a picture of the court on their phone.
GOING UP THE LADDER
In order to truly empathize with the installers, my team and I traveled to some local schools that had planned on installing a Focus camera. We watched as they unboxed the packaging of the camera, read through the instructions in the box, and went through the new connection flow we designed in the app. This gave us the opportunity to see first hand if there were any unexpected challenges they experienced as well as see what resonated with them during the process. It also allowed my team of engineers to work through any technical issues we experienced in the field related to connectivity due to the variety of locations our users were installing cameras in their gyms.
Takeaway 1 : Onboarding
We were able to see how our installers interpreted the language we used in the step-by-step instructions and their expectation of what the “definition of done” meant. I began exploring a variety of ways we could be more clear in each step and focused primarily on the following principles that are common in user onboarding:
Give users a sense of how long the task at hand is going to take.
Give users a sense of their progress on the task at hand.
Provide users with an overview of the different steps that encompass the task at hand.
Allow users to refer to instructions at any given time for a specific step.
As I was iterating on various ways to make each step’s expected state clear for the installer, I made sure to work closely with members of the Customer Success and Marketing teams as they helped us understand some of the ‘misses’ from the Beta experience the year prior.
Takeaway 2 : Troubleshooting
Testing in person, we were able to witness the breadth of potential errors a user could experience if something was physically wrong with their camera. My team and I designed an in-app troubleshooting guide for all the potential cases of hardware failure so that an installer would have a path forward in the case they had a faulty camera. This wasn’t originally in scope for the project, but due to the potential of being a complete blocker for users I advocated for it to be included.
Takeaway 3 : Positioning the Camera
We found that when an installer was positioning the camera the way in which we were instructing them in-app to line up the court to the view of the camera was confusing. We needed to redesign the screens to be more explicit in instruction, implement a “final check” step after the camera was positioned, and inverse the “bar” in which we were instructing installers to line the camera up in. The images below display the various iterations I explored throughout the process before landing on the final solution.
Takeaway 4 : “Wi-Fi Magic” was a Smoother Experience
Even though we had pretty good results from our early usability tests, we knew that if we were able to seamlessly connect to the Focus Wi-Fi network without having installers exit the app that we would have higher confidence in them installing the camera correctly the first time. This became more clear when we tested the flow with users in person, so we decided to make the change and invest in a better user experience.
SOLUTION
OUTCOMES
As cameras began to ship during the summer before seasons started we began to receive data on how the installations were performing. On average it took installers about 10-15 minutes to position their camera and about 2 minutes for the images of the court to be uploaded to our internal Hudl servers. This was a vast improvement from the previous year where installations could have taken days because installers were running into IT blockers and wouldn’t be able to see the angle of the camera pointing to the court. The new installation time compared to competitors was significant as well, since it would take a few days for installation and would require on-site representatives to complete the process end-to-end.
REFLECTIONS
This was my first time working with an end-to-end digital experience that was dependent on a physical device. This exposed me to service design thinking in which I learned a lot about considering what our users were experiencing outside of the specific problems we were set out to solve. There were multiple scenarios and challenges for our users to get through that I hadn't considered when I started this project mainly because I was initially dependent on the original team who worked on the Beta release of the camera the year prior for gaining user empathy. It was crucial for me to schedule in-person walkthroughs and interviews with our installers so that I could witness the potential opportunities we had to help alleviate problems they were experiencing from receiving the camera at the school to watching their first game recording. If I hadn't had that in-person experience I wouldn't have truly understood their circumstances and advocated for additional scope for the project to address some issues I felt strongly about.
This experience also reminded me of how important having clear objectives and outcomes from the start of a project is. The process of installing a Focus camera to eventually record your first game, spanned a broad set of areas to improve. These ranged anywhere from updating the printed materials in the box, to rethinking the automated emails sent to the school staff, to of course the physical installation of the device. As we dug deeper into the end-to-end process it was easy to get bogged down by these areas we wanted to fix, and we would have to spend time as a team aligning on what our objective was for this particular project. “What are we trying to solve? How are we going to know we solved it? How can we measure success?” were all questions we revisited week after week to remind ourselves of the task at hand, which became distracting to our primary goal. Following this project, I’ve made sure to be an advocate for team alignment on goals, objectives, scope, etc as soon as an initiative starts so that we solve a problem really well before moving on to the next one.