Conceptualizing and designing a digital platform for coaches.
The process behind the redesign of Fútbol Sesión.
«When you train a massive club or little third division outfit, when you go out to play football in any situation, it is always about winning». –Pep Guardiola
«A chocolate croissant and an espresso». –Baku
Perhaps a chocolate croissant (chocolate on both the outside and inside) is not the best dietary choice when you get together with three first-division football trainers and coaches, but that’s the way, with these words — far less epic than Pep Guardiola’s — that the first meeting with Fútbol Sesión’s team took place at a cafeteria in Barcelona.
As a result of their effort, a first — although quite rudimentary — digital platform was born some years ago. Its mission was clear: to provide football coaches with tools to improve and expand their own sessions. With this platform and a good content base they had achieved a significant amount of subscribers and recognition from sports clubs and football schools.
Several coffees later, it was obvious that the client was really good at what they do — creating tools for other football coaches — but their platform was too passive. Users could download exercises and training sessions created by FS, but they could not create their own exercises. We agreed that it would be much more interesting if we were able to turn the situation around. And we were committed to presenting a proposal to work with them in the conceptualization (from scratch) of a new platform, which put the needs of the user in the front line. What came later were several months of work, starting with the renewal of their visual identity.
Fútbol Sesión: visual identity
A complete renovation of the platform required a rethinking of its brand, with a new logo and the definition of its entire visual ecosystem, so far not yet established.
The brand acquires robustness without completely abandoning the codes to which users of the platform are accustomed, creating a new symbol around a football ball and becoming the fundamental identifying element of the brand, linked to an iconography easily recognizable by its audience and a fresh language.
We create a color code based on the palette that predominates in a football field: the green of the lawn and the blue of the sky, configuring different shades to use next to the black and white that were and are part of the base logo.
Alongside the logo, typographic criteria are established to unify the general usage in all applications. All the identifying and communicative reflections around the new visual identity are grouped into a digital manual that grows as new content is added or updated. This manual also serves as a download center for all the fundamental identity elements.
The platform
The platform works based on a subscription system, with an annual price that allows access to the offered resources in an unlimited way. These resources are constantly growing and represent the initial value for which the customers of Fútbol Sesión are interested in the platform.
We have a public part, aimed at capturing users and exposing features and a private part with improved access to the key contents of the project.
With the redefinition of the platform, the main challenge is to create, organize and make it accessible to users an extensive library of practical knowledge about football, in which each exercise or training session is perfectly documented with visuals and support information, allowing it to be used quickly on the pitch by coaches of different categories.
The labeling and filtering system of all the content becomes the essential function for an efficient access. In addition, a personal library is created where users can group all those public exercises that they consider relevant, in addition to those created by themselves.
In this way, users can create self-managed ‘galleries’ containing personal selections of exercises they can filter or discriminate at pleasure.
The key: the editor
With the redefinition of the platform, it was necessary to take an additional step that would definitely transform the platform into something more than a huge repository of pre-created information. For this reason, a new tool is incorporated into the project, becoming the heart of the project: a personalized training editor. Thanks to the editor, users can create complete and complex exercises tailored to them in minutes, powered by a fluid, pleasant, simple, intuitive and carefully designed experience.
It integrates all types of tools to add training materials, directional arrows, player configuration, type of training field, etc., which can be modified, moved and arranged as they please, accompanying each visual planning of a complete descriptive sheet. The workouts are stored on the platform and can be exported in various formats and reedited when needed.
Thereby, any user of the platform happens to have the same resources and independence as the editors of the Fútbol Sesión team, with their own imagination and know-how as the only limit to the creation of training exercises.
The result
Fútbol Sesión customers get a modern tool that grants them autonomy when creating their own exercises, and the most extensive library of resources created by first-division professionals, with more than two thousand workouts and exercises ready for to be put into practice. In addition, all their preferences and exercises, carefully collected during years, remain intact in the new platform, with the possibility of resuming their activity normally, accessing a multitude of new advantages that make their relationship with Fútbol Sesión something bigger, important and lasting.
The results of the project stem from the recognition of a great initial idea, immature and insufficiently developed, later converted through collaborative work with the client into a product with a renewed image, a clear commercial focus, an expanded global reach and a well-crafted user experience.
More info: Baku.cat / Futbolsesion.com
