Titan Tennis
Solo-designed from zero. Drill creation, court visualisation, QR sharing, and community, built for players and coaches worldwide.
What I Built
Complexities
The Outcome
Reflection
Ball machines have existed for decades. The problem: their controls never kept up with the sport. Most came with a physical fob offering a handful of basic settings, speed, feed rate, and not much else. The only app alternative on the market was rudimentary at best.
Titan Ball Machines, built by former engineers from Nokia, Google, and Siemens, had a hardware product that was genuinely superior. What it didn't have was a software experience to match. I was brought in to build it from zero, and as a tennis player myself, I came with a clear point of view about what the app needed to be.
I designed the entire Titan Drills Pro app, sole designer, zero to one, working with engineers at Beijing Hatchibot.
Drill creation and control: players and coaches can build drills with precision, setting ball speed, feed depth, height, spin, trajectory, and lateral deviation for each shot in a sequence. A visual court representation shows exactly where each ball will land, updating in real time as parameters change. A test-ball function lets users fire a single shot to verify placement before running a full drill.
QR drill sharing: coaches can create drills and share them instantly via QR code. Players scan and load a drill in seconds, no manual re-entry, no friction. Titan partnered with professional players to publish a library of pro drills, all accessible the same way.
MegaDrill and multi-drill sessions: users can chain multiple drills into a single session, targeting different aspects of their game in sequence, footwork, groundstrokes, net play, without stopping to reconfigure.
Community channels and onboarding: a full onboarding flow, community content layer, and profile system to support the growing Titan user base.
The core design challenge was translating precise physical parameters, things like ball trajectory angle, oscillation deviation, and topspin intensity, into controls that felt intuitive on a phone screen. These aren't abstract sliders. They have real physical consequences on court. If the visual feedback isn't accurate, players lose trust in the app and go back to the fob.
I designed the court visualisation system to be the primary feedback layer: every parameter change reflects immediately as a visual update on the court diagram. Players build drills spatially, not numerically. The result is an interface that feels like coaching, not configuration.
Working across iOS and Android simultaneously with an engineering team in Beijing added another layer of complexity, clear, unambiguous design specifications and a robust component approach were essential to keep both platforms consistent.
Titan Drills Pro shipped and is now the primary companion app for Titan ball machines worldwide. The app has been reviewed extensively on YouTube by players and coaches across multiple markets, with reviewers consistently citing the drill creation system and QR sharing as the features that make Titan machines worth buying.
One reviewer put it directly: the QR code drill sharing alone is worth the price of the machine. That's a product design outcome.
The app continues to receive updates, smartwatch control and further drill library expansion are in active development, built on the foundation and design system I established.
Titan was the project where being a user made me a better designer. Playing tennis meant I understood instinctively where the friction was, the moment a parameter felt abstract, the moment a flow felt one step too long. That domain knowledge shaped every decision.
It also reinforced something I believe about product design: the best sports technology disappears. The app shouldn't feel like work. It should feel like practice.