The Coaches' Voice

The Coaches' Voice is a content-led football platform featuring interviews and tactical breakdowns from top managers and coaches. The website was undergoing a redesign to improve content visibility, streamline navigation, and elevate its brand identity. Additionally, a new LMS was developed to support the platform, enabling coaches to both create and engage with learning content.

• Poor discoverability of articles and videos
• Unclear information hierarchy, especially on mobile
• Visual design that didn't reflect the premium quality of its editorial or video content
• Lack of scalable design components for future content growth

Additionally, a new Learning Management System (LMS) was required — one that could integrate into the existing design system while meeting the unique needs of football coaches through understanding modern coaching workflows and designing with empathy for how coaches and admins interact with learning tools.

• Improve content discoverability through better UX structure
• Enhance editorial storytelling with richer, more immersive layouts
• Develop a modular design system to support different types of content
• Ensure responsive consistency and strong performance across devices
• Design an LMS experience tailored to football coaches and admins, aligned with real-world coaching workflows and learning habits

1. UX Audit & Discovery

• Conducted a detailed heuristic evaluation of the existing site to identify usability issues
• Mapped content types and user journeys (LMS vs video vs article vs academy sections)
• Analysed performance metrics to identify bounce points and user pain
• Used Hotjar to gather qualitative insights via heatmaps and session recordings
• Created personas to understand LMS goals, pain points and needs

2. Information Architecture & Wireframing

• Reworked the site hierarchy to improve discoverability of editorial content and coach profiles
• Designed wireframes for LMS, homepage, article templates, video pages, and category filtering
• Conducted usability testing via UserTesting.com to validate new features and structure

3. UI & Visual Design

• Delivered a design system with components across LMS and websites
• Created a visual identity that merged sporting authority with modern journalism
• Defined scalable components (cards, headers, filters, carousels)

4. Collaboration & Handoff

• Presented prototypes in Figma to stakeholders for feedback
• Iterated based on content editor needs and mobile use-case testing
• Delivered annotated design files and responsive specs to developers

A major part of the role was developing and maintaining a robust, multi-brand design system in Figma. This supported various products under The Coaches' Voice umbrella — including CV Academy, CV Tours, and MBP School — built for scalability, ensuring visual consistency while allowing each brand to retain its own identity through reusable components, Figma variables, and flexible templates.

The LMS platform was tailored for use by multiple football associations, leagues, and clubs — accommodating diverse content needs from elite coach education to grassroots development, while remaining intuitive for users of varying technical experience. Work focused on key functionality such as session planning, progress tracking, and coach management tools meeting the real-world demands of high-performance environments.

• Clearer content hierarchy and stronger engagement across article and video pages
• Improved content flexibility, allowing the client to showcase diverse media formats
• A refreshed visual identity that aligns with the brand's elite coaching values
• Modular components enabled rapid rollout of new sections like CV Academy
• A tailored LMS experience was launched, built using the same design system

• Designing for content-rich platforms and LMS environments requires flexible component systems — design tokens and variables are key to maintaining consistency and scalability
• Testing with real users — football coaches and club admins — is essential; their domain expertise uncovers insights no designer could predict alone