MCT Hub
Spring 2026
Role: UX Designer & Researcher
This is an abridged version, read the full (admittedly long) version here if you're interested in more of my thought process.
Problem
The Michigan Climbing Team currently operates in a fragmented manner, utilizing several different digital platforms to meet their needs:
Email for announcements
GroupMe for team chatter
Google Forms for carpool logistics
Physical printouts for training sign-ups and attendance
This led to difficulty in locating information for members, as well as tedious manual data collection and organization for team leadership.
To solve this, I set out to design a centralized hub to consolidate the current systems so that team members could spend less time worrying about logistics and more time climbing ☺.
The real challenge was less about combining the experiences into one, but ensuring the new centralized experience was genuinely more efficient. Thus, this write-up focuses less on how the product works, and more on why it works so well.
Process
To understand how the existing system affected the team, I conducted discovery interviews with 10+ active members.
I focused on how athletes and leadership handled announcements, carpools, training, communication, and attendance.
Key findings from that research were:
Information was distributed across too many places
Attendance tracking created unnecessary effort
Existing workflows lacked flexibility
These findings helped inform the product strategy.
Centralize without overwhelming
Make recurring tasks feel lightweight
Design for both athletes and leadership
I built the information architecture for the app, organized around the key moments a team member may be involved with:
Here is a little look at the design exploration process.
Featured flow: attendance
Attendance was one of the clearest opportunities to improve the team’s existing workflow.
Athletes needed a quick way to check in and understand their participation. Leadership needed a reliable way to review attendance across 50+ members.
My initial attendance concept focused on displaying individual practice dates in a compact list.
This approach kept the interface simple, but it removed important scheduling context. Usability testing revealed that users had a hard time understanding where those dates fit within the larger month and indicated that a calendar view would make attendance easier to interpret.
During feedback and iteration, users indicated that a calendar view would make attendance easier to interpret.
The issue was not that the information was missing. The issue was that the structure did not match the way users were accustomed to understanding schedules. So I redesigned it.
The updated flow allows members to:
Understand attendance in the context of the month
Recognize upcoming and previous practices
Scan participation without interpreting disconnected dates
Use a familiar scheduling pattern
Most users possess high, almost innate familiarity with visualizing schedules via calendars. Iterations like this reinforced the importance of designing around users’ existing mental models rather than optimizing only for information density.
This process of refining the product through user testing and feedback became a crucial part of my process in builiding MCT Hub.
Designing for leadership
While the athlete experience focused on completing tasks quickly, the leadership experience focused on scanning and managing participation across the team.
Leadership needed to be able to scan the data quickly and recognize members who may need extra attention.
Key design decisions:
A roster-based layout supports quick scanning.
Semantic color coding makes participation status easier to recognize.
Filters reduce the effort required to find specific members.
Consistent visual language connects the leadership and athlete experiences.
The moderator view mimics the athlete’s personal view, maintaining internal consistency across the entire application while providing the advanced oversight necessary for team management.
The intended impact was to turn attendance data from something leadership had to manually organize into something they could easily track and interpret.
Creating clarity
I used interaction design to make recurring tasks feel predictable and easy to verify.
Progressive disclosure
Sign-up flows reveal decisions in smaller steps rather than presenting every field at once.
Here we have an example of what posting a carpool might look like…
For ease, I provided default options that align with team norms like pickup sites…
Realistic 'seats available' options and the team standard 6:35 PM pickup time….
Purpose: reduce cognitive load during multi-step tasks.
Confirmation states
Users receive clear feedback after completing or cancelling an action.
Purpose: reinforce system status and reduce uncertainty.
Here are a couple more examples.
Familiar mental models
The product uses recognizable patterns for announcements, messaging, calendars, and forms.
Purpose: Centralize workflows without forcing users to learn unfamiliar interaction patterns.
Responsive feedback
Button states, filters, and participation updates provide immediate visual feedback.
Purpose: Help users understand that the system recognized their action.
Outcome
MCT Hub translated a fragmented set of team workflows into one cohesive product experience.
The app was designed to:
Give athletes one place to find team information
Reduce friction in recurring sign-up and check-in tasks
Make attendance easier to understand
Give leadership a clearer way to review participation
Preserve familiar interaction patterns while introducing a more unified system
Because the project hasn't begun development yet, I have not measured changes in completion time, attendance accuracy, or administrative effort. Those would be important metrics to evaluate during development and real-world use.
Reflections
The biggest lesson from MCT Hub was that centralization alone does not create a better product.
The value comes from understanding which parts of an existing workflow are frustrating, identifying the mental models users already rely on, and designing a system that improves those moments without adding unnecessary complexity.
The next step would be to move the prototype into development and validate whether the new workflows reduce completion time, errors, and administrative effort for the team.
Next Project (Fray)
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