PlayerEdge
Building Trust Into a Youth Sports Coaching Marketplace
PlayerEdge is a two-sided marketplace that connects young athletes with professional coaches through asynchronous video feedback. A parent uploads a clip of their child's gameplay, chooses a coach and a focus area, and receives a detailed, personalized breakdown — voiceover, on-screen annotations, and replay analysis — within 48 hours. Think Cameo meets private coaching.
The platform launched with baseball and softball, with a roadmap to expand across sports.
- Model: Two-sided marketplace, youth sports coaching
- Platform: Web + mobile, built on Bubble
- Price point: $50–$100 per lesson
- Core loop: Submit a clip → choose a coach and focus → pay per lesson → receive a video breakdown
- My role: [add your role — e.g. Product / UX / Visual Design]
Three tensions defined the design challenge:
- Trust. Parents are sending videos of their children to people they've never met. The product had to feel safe, credible, and accountable at every step.
- Premium feel. This is a paid service competing on quality, not a free app. The experience needed to look and feel worth $50–$100 per lesson.
- Workflow complexity. Upload, review, annotation, voiceover recording, payment, and refunds all had to feel effortless — on both sides of the marketplace.
Compounding this, the platform was built on Bubble, which doesn't support native glass effects — the foundation of the intended visual language.
A premium, dark-mode-first product with a clearly defined lesson lifecycle, trust built into the structure of the experience rather than bolted on, and a design system engineered to deliver a high-end feel within Bubble's real constraints.
Everything else — the brand, the design system, the two-sided flows — exists to make one simple, repeatable loop feel trustworthy and effortless: submit a clip, choose a coach, pay, receive a breakdown.
UI Design System
The app aesthetic was built around a premium, dark-mode-first approach with glass-effect surfaces, rounded corners, and depth through opacity layers. The color system was refined across multiple syncs:
• Dark backgrounds at 60–80% black opacity for headers and cards
• Vibrant green reserved for CTAs and payment-related actions
• Gold as the primary accent for navigation and premium elements
• Video thumbnails use a 60–70% dark overlay with blur as background treatment
A key constraint: the platform was built on Bubble, which doesn't support native glass effects. The team worked around this with stroke treatments and layered background colors to approximate the intended depth. SF Pro was selected as the primary typeface after GT America was flagged at $1,000+ for licensing.
Brand & Design System
Brand direction
The client initially leaned toward a red, white, and blue baseball aesthetic. After presenting three brand concepts, that direction was set aside in favor of something more refined.
The final palette landed on dark green and gold, drawing on Baylor's color identity — green for the field and community, gold for value and expertise. The wordmark uses all-caps typography, and the overall tone targets premium and professional rather than playful or overtly sporty. Bruce Bolt and Absolutely Ridiculous served as reference brands for their balance of modern appeal and athletic credibility.
UI design system
The interface is built around a premium, dark-mode-first approach: glass-effect surfaces, rounded corners, and depth created through layered opacity. The system was refined across multiple design syncs:
- Dark backgrounds at 60–80% black opacity for headers and cards
- Vibrant green reserved for CTAs and payment actions
- Gold as the primary accent for navigation and premium elements
- Video thumbnails treated with a 60–70% dark overlay and blur
The key constraint: Bubble doesn't support native glass effects. Rather than abandon the aesthetic, we approximated it using stroke treatments and layered background colors to recreate the intended depth. SF Pro became the primary typeface after GT America was flagged at $1,000+ in licensing — a pragmatic call that kept the type system clean without inflating cost.
Lesson Flow
The lesson lifecycle was one of the most critical UX flows. We defined four statuses that drive the entire experience:
• Pending Upload — Coach has received the request, player is waiting
• In Progress — Coach is reviewing and recording their response
• Completed — Video feedback deliveredExpired — Coach didn't respond in time; automatic refund triggered
Payment releases automatically when the coach uploads their response video. No player approval step required. This was a deliberate decision to reduce friction while the expired status acts as a safety net, tracking coach reliability.
Pending upload cards use light mode with no video thumbnail. Once a video is attached, the card background switches to a screenshot from the video with a dark overlay and blur treatment.
Coach Experience
Coaches enter through a dedicated /coach URL with a separate onboarding flow: basic account creation, an application (with optional video and photo), and mandatory profile completion before going live on the platform.
The coach dashboard surfaces active lessons, pending reviews, and performance metrics. The review system for MVP keeps it lean: star rating required, text review optional. "Lessons completed" replaces "years of experience" as the primary credibility signal.
The video recording interface lets coaches replay uploaded footage, pause, draw annotations directly on the video, and record voiceover commentary. This is the core value delivery moment of the entire platform.
Authentication & Roles
Rather than building separate login pages per user type, we designed a single login page with backend role-based redirects. Coaches access the platform through a dedicated /coach URL, but the authentication UI itself is unified.
This simplified the entry point while keeping the experiences distinct once inside the app. Coach applications go through a review process before profiles go live, maintaining quality control on the supply side.
PlayerEdge treats trust as a design problem, not a marketing message. It's built into the account model (age thresholds, parent-controlled profiles), the lesson lifecycle (automatic refunds, reliability tracking), and the credibility signals coaches are measured by (verified lessons completed over self-reported experience).
The result is a premium, dark-mode marketplace that makes a genuinely complex video workflow — upload, review, annotate, narrate, pay, refund — feel effortless on both sides, all delivered within the real constraints of a Bubble build and a lean MVP scope.
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