Olivia Jordan

What Figure Skating Taught Me About UX

Recently, I came across a new term, User Experience, or UX, which refers to how a person feels when interacting with a product, system, or service. I did not expect figure skating to become a way for me to understand UX, but over time it started to feel familiar in a way I could not ignore.

As a skater, one challenge I have experienced repeatedly is how difficult it is to maintain consistency in training. Programs change frequently. Coaches adjust choreography or technical elements depending on progress, competition goals, or time constraints. At the same time, coaches often manage multiple students, which makes it difficult to provide continuous feedback to everyone.

As a result, skaters are left trying to piece together their own understanding of what to practice and how to improve. Notes get lost. Corrections are forgotten. Training becomes reactive instead of structured.

This is where I started imagining what a better system could look like. If we think about skating through a UX lens, the problem is not just about training harder. It is about creating a clearer feedback loop between practice, observation, and guidance.

One idea could be a simple app designed specifically for skaters and coaches. Skaters could log their programs, track changes, and record training sessions in one place. They could upload videos from practice so coaches can review them later, even outside of scheduled sessions. Coaches could leave structured feedback directly on specific moments in the video, making corrections more precise and easier to revisit.

Over time, this would create a continuous training history instead of isolated sessions. Skaters would not need to rely only on memory after practice, and coaches would not need to repeat the same feedback across different sessions. It would support more consistent, intentional practice.

What I find interesting is that this is not really a skating problem. It is an information flow problem. Who has access to feedback. When it is delivered. How it is retained. How it is applied over time. These are all UX questions, even though the context is physical movement on ice.

In that sense, designing better training tools for skaters could not only improve practice, but also change how learning itself is experienced. It makes me wonder what else in training could be redesigned to support better clarity and consistency.