Recruiting. The never ending design journey. Over the course of my time on NCAA we had several designers contribute their concept of what recruiting should be and Point Based recruiting was my version. Similar to Coach Skills, there were a few pillars established early on:

Simplify the current recruiting process while maintaining all of the great depth.
Keep the experience short. Target was at most ten minutes per each week of the season.
Visualize the data we were presenting as much as possible.

The previous Phone Call iteration of recruiting was good in that it provided a great deal of depth and personality for each recruit. But based on feedback and telemetry data we were seeing fewer users use the feature for a significant period of time. The primary reason was that it took too long. Games already take 45 minutes, if you add in another 30 to 40 minutes of recruiting our players were unable to get in more than one game a night. So the objective was established to shorten the experience but to maintain the depth.

In order to accomplish this we had to redesign the entire UI, making it as streamlined as possible. During this process the focus became visualizing the data as much as possible. The UI Artist and I went through each screen, identifying what data was critical in order for the player to decide on which prospect to recruit. In the end we trimmed it down to a handful of tabs that were scaled based on their interest. There is enough data to adjust your point distribution and offer scholarships on the Prospect Overview (shown above).

However if the user wants to dig and find out more information about the prospect, they can explore the other tabs. We re-did visits and added some additional logic behind scheduling visits based upon conversations with actual college coaches. Behind the scenes, all of the Dynamic Grades we had updated the previous year were still being used. There were a few things that didn't really make the cut, such as the text descriptions, but for the most part the depth is there and we were well within that ten minute experience with as much of the data visualized as possible.