Talentive
A mobile app that connects football players, coaches and scouts through skill tests, leaderboards and real rewards. A foundational design engagement where I set the visual language and core patterns before the client's internal team took it forward.
Football talent, visible to everyone
Talentive's mission is refreshingly direct: make football skill objectively measurable so that talented players can prove themselves, coaches can structure real development programmes, and scouts can discover great players regardless of geography or connections.
I was brought in as a contractor to establish the foundational designs. That meant defining the visual identity, designing the core user flows and creating the interaction patterns that the client's own design team would build on after my engagement ended. The scope was intentionally focused on getting the foundations right rather than trying to design every screen in the app.
Game for the player, tool for the scout
The app has to work for two very different audiences at the same time. For a 16-year-old winger, it needs to feel exciting, competitive and rewarding enough to keep coming back to. For a professional scout comparing 200 players in a spreadsheet-heavy workflow, it needs to be clean, data-dense and credible.
The design challenge was building a single visual system that celebrates progress and achievement without tipping into the cartoonish territory that fitness apps often fall into, while still giving scouts the structured, information-rich surfaces they need to do serious evaluation work. Those two goals pull in opposite directions, and finding the right balance required a lot of back and forth with both user groups during the design process.
Brand book first, interaction second
Talentive came with an existing brand identity built around a bold yellow-on-black palette, a strong wordmark and a tone rooted in energy and competition. My job was not to reinvent the visual language but to take those brand elements and make them work beautifully inside a mobile app that football players would actually enjoy using.
I worked in Figma and the scope covered the first wave of core designs: onboarding, the main home screen, leaderboards, the rewards surface and the challenge flows including the moment a player receives a head-to-head challenge and decides to accept or decline it. Each of these screens had to balance the excitement players want with the clarity scouts need.
Progression as the home screen
"Level 20" is the first thing a returning player sees alongside their per-category stats for sprint, wallball, reaction, slalom and stamina, plus the reward points they have earned. Consistent training compounds into visible rank progress, which gives players a concrete reason to keep testing themselves.
The Level system gave the entire app a single unit of identity that players could rally around. It became the thing people mentioned first when describing the app to their teammates, which is exactly what a good progression system should do.
Head-to-head challenges and leaderboards
The wallball challenge became the product's primary social hook. Direct challenges to friends, scored and ranked on the spot. Leaderboards scope to friends, local area and global so every player can find a realistic context to compete in, whether they are training at a local pitch or comparing themselves against the best in the country.
Promotion to a new rank becomes a genuine milestone worth chasing. The design treats rank-ups as celebration moments with clear visual feedback, because those small dopamine hits are what keep players coming back to train again tomorrow. Getting that emotional design right was just as important as getting the data architecture right for scouts.
Foundations, handed off cleanly
Talentive launched with the initial design system I established, and the client's internal designer took the product forward from there. That is a healthy outcome for a foundational engagement. My role was never to own the product forever but to set up a strong enough foundation that someone else could confidently build on top of it.
The visual language, core interaction patterns and the engagement loop that drives the app today all trace back to that first wave of work. Seeing another designer pick up what you built and successfully extend it is one of the most satisfying outcomes in this kind of contract work. It means the system was genuinely robust, not just well-documented.