Fluid Pickleball
Web and Mobile
Role: Design Director
Team: 2 co-founders, 1 engineer, 2 visual designers
Timeline: 18 weeks
As Design Director on this project, I set the tone across product, brand, and I led design across web, mobile, and brand for Fluid, a platform that turned messy spreadsheets and group chats into a seamless competitive ecosystem for pickleball clubs.
The Setup
Fluid’s vision was twofold:
• Launch a mobile app that delivered a focused, intuitive experience for club members making it easy to join a league, know when and where to play, and track their season.
• Redesign the Fluid marketing site with a more polished brand and more effective UX to drive signups and communicate product value clearly.
Our design needed to support real-world behavior, not abstract ideal flows so we obsessed over friction points, edge cases, and what club runners were actually doing day to day.
The Problem
Most amateur pickleball clubs rely on a patchwork of spreadsheets, Venmo links, and calendar invites. Organizers spend hours coordinating schedules and chasing down payments. Players struggle to stay informed or even show up at the right time.
Fluid’s challenge was to replace all that with a cohesive experience for both sides. We set out to design tools that made club management intuitive and participation effortless.
We started by mapping the end-to-end user journeys for both players and organizers capturing how people were currently managing matches, payments, invites, and rosters.
This fed into a dual-surface architecture:
Mobile was optimized for clarity, availability, and scheduling low-effort, high-clarity moments.
Web handled deeper operational flows: league setup, payment status, and multi-league management.
Wireframes
Our wireframes focused on the flows that mattered most:
→ Inviting and grouping players
→ Scheduling matches and setting availability
→ Collecting dues and confirming participation
→ Keeping players informed without overwhelming them
The emphasis was on reducing noise and making it feel like everything just clicked.
Workshops
I ran several workshops with founders, PMs, and engineers to shape product direction, prioritize flow integrity, and maintain clarity across the mobile and web experiences.
These sessions also included the visual design team, ensuring brand updates didn’t come at the expense of UX or vice versa.
Visual Design
The visual direction needed to feel optimistic and energetic, without losing structure. I guided the brand designer in elevating Fluid’s early look into a consistent system across surfaces.
This included:
→A friendlier, more legible typographic hierarchy
→A refined color system with clear states for scheduling and availability
→Visual treatments that translated seamlessly between product UI and marketing collateral
Design athletic apps like someone will use it in a parking lot, on 2% battery, mid-conversation.
Design System
We created a unified UI kit that spanned both the mobile app and marketing site. We standardized components like CTA styles, status tags, and onboarding elements freeing us to focus on interaction details without constantly reinventing.
Clarifying the Story
We rebuilt the page structure from the ground up, focusing on clear messaging, user segmentation, and a better visual hierarchy for club owners.
The New Site
We developed an exciting new layout and brand story that elevated the website and made Fluid feel more alive.
Outcomes
We launched a sleek new mobile app that let members schedule matches, book courts and lessons, and track their own stats, plus a redesigned website that made Fluid feel like the modern, credible, slightly-too-cool-for-you platform it always was under the hood.
Reflections
Fluid wasn’t just a software sprint. It was a cross-surface rethink of what community sports software could be.
I helped define the mental model for how play happens, shaped the interaction logic behind organizing and showing up, and directed a visual system that made the whole thing feel human and sharp.
We didn’t just improve a product, we gave it presence, structure, and scale.
“This is so freaking awesome.
We love it”
- Thai Huynh (Fluid Co-founder)