What is Hudl?
Hudl is a software company that makes sports video analysis tools for coaches and athletes. Teams upload their game film to our site, study it, and "break it down" by adding text notes, ink telestrations, and tagged metadata.
Coaches then share the edited segments of video with groups of players on their team. Athletes can consume the annotated video on their iOS and Android devices throughout the week in preparation for their next game. If an athlete notices a great play, he or she can highlight it to appear on a public profile for fans, parents, and recruiters to see.
What do Front-end Designers do at Hudl?
We have a perfect place carved out for those people who live in a world between pure design and pure development. Front-end Designers are responsible for writing quality front-end code and keeping the visual bar high in our apps. They're constantly challenging us to keep our code and styles consistent using our internal UI pattern library.
They begin by assisting the user research process with coaches of all sports to understand latent needs beyond just the basics of what they say they want. It's important for our entire team to see and hear or themselves the problems facing our users. There’s no requirements doc handed down from on high.
Next, they rough out concepts to test with other designers, developers, QA, and their project manager. They sketch, they mock, and they prototype the key interactions. And often, they throw big pieces out when it doesn't click in a user study.
Once the concepts do start clicking, Front-end Designers team up with a visual and/or interaction designer to that everything looks great and feels even better.
But, designers don’t stop after the first release. They work closely with PM’s as we roll-out improvements so that we can refine it as the product gets real-world use. We can selectively enable new features to small groups of coaches and athletes to validate that we’re on the right track.
Practically, all this means you carry the squad with elegant front-end code and purposeful visual design. Those are the non-negotiable requirements. We also expect that you:
- Excel in giving and receiving respectfully blunt feedback and critique.
- Have strong beliefs, loosely held, about what’s best for the product.
- Know how and when to tactfully say, “No."
- Are unafraid to make small, quick changes and launch them as experiments to validate your assumptions and opinions.
- Think that great copywriting is an essential part of creating clear user interfaces.
- Consciously choose the best medium and fidelity to convey your ideas at each stage of a project. In other words, you know the universe exists outside of Sublime Text and Photoshop.
- Can tell the story of a product or service with sharp copy and crisp imagery—people get fired up after your presentations.
Tell me about the team I would work with (Team Sports).
The Team Sports tribe at Hudl is responsible for the first half of our company mission: “Help Coaches Win.” We are building tools that coaches can use to gain an edge on their opponents using a medley of video, annotations, and analytics.
You’ll work within one of the six squads that comprise the tribe: Mobile, Core, Recruit, Football, Basketball, and Conversion. Two more squads are on the way in 2015. Each squad includes one designer, one or two developers, a quality assurance analyst, and a project/product manager.
How should I apply? Any advice?
Send us a cover letter that relates your experience to what you think we need here at Hudl. Be sure to include a link to your portfolio or, at the very least, links to pieces of your past work.
We place the majority of our evaluation on your portfolio. Make sure it’s up-to-date, hosted online, and includes descriptions of your specific role on each project. Bulleted lists don’t help as much as short stories about your process and what you learned. Treat your portfolio like a product itself and a reflection of your craft as a designer. Do that and you’ll have a great head start.
Telecommuting
We love our remote workers. Currently, about 25% of our product team works remotely so we're set up really well for it. But we can only hire if you live/work in or are moving to California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, Nebraska or the United Kingdom. We pay for travel back to HQ in Lincoln, NE office every 6-8 weeks.
We Know Titles Are Confusing. Here's a Comparison of Hudl's Design Openings:
On the Product Team, designers are responsible for three main things: visual design, interaction design, and front-end code. Here's how those responsibilities are shared across the three roles:
- Product Designers do all three and typically work as the solo designer on a squad.
- UI Designers own the visual and interaction design and often team up with another designer on a squad.
- Front-end Designers handle front-end development along with visual design. They will also pair-up with another designer from time-to-time.
On the Marketing Team, we are also hiring Interactive Designers who design and build our public (non-app) website. They also promote the Hudl through regular print, email, and web campaigns.