Onform: Video Analysis App

OnForm is the best coaching app I’ve used. It has every feature I need in a coaching app, and is being continually improved. I can group players by the location at which they take lessons. I can create a PDF lesson plan for my students and load it into their folder, or add instructional materials. We can text back and forth within the app between lessons, giving me a record of those exchanges, and they can send me videos taken in the app to get my feedback. The two video analysis capability really helps the students visualize how the changes have improved the swing. The voiceover capability makes it easy to record an analysis for a virtual lesson. I love the feature to keep private notes from each lesson. This helps me remember the details of the instruction I gave them during the lesson. The ability to add a parent or another coach is a feature I haven’t seen in another app. It’s imperative for parents to know everything a coach sends to students under 18, and this feature makes it seamless to do so. I also like to communicate with their youth coaches, and with this app I can easily bring them into the loop to see what I am teaching the student. Finally, they are very responsive when you have a question, usually getting back to you in a day or less. Since I’ve been using this product I haven’t for a minute considered going to anything else.

I started using OnForm as a previous Hudl user. Getting onboarded to using OnForm was okay, but the navigation was confusing at first. It is weird that you have to go into Library of videos, from the Home screen, to simply start recording a new video. Seems like an unnecessary step. I like the way the app automatically optimizes the camera settings to the specific lighting in which you are filming. But, the biggest negative to the app, is the flywheel. It’s a major downgrade from Hudl. In order to replay your videos frame-by-frame, you use the flywheel to scroll. But if your finger lets off the flywheel for just a moment, the flywheel disengages, the drawing button engages, and you have to move scroll with your finger again to-reengage the flywheel. It’s annoying because I am often watching videos closely and exclusively using the flywheel to make the video progress, amd I keep having to “recapture” the flywheel to make it engage again. You have so much space on your phone to scroll, so by the time I get the flywheel responding to my scrolling, I have to let off to reposition. It’s just not very gold for people who don’t use the “play” function to play the video and instead want to use the fly wheel so they can constantly go forwards and backwards as the need to as they watch the replay.

Hudl was a great all sports analysis app that allow organization by tags and people. As a figure skating coach, being able to quickly pull up an element I’m teaching a student was key. OnForm is five steps in wrong direction. For one it seems very golf specific, the layout is extremely clunky with massive amounts of wasted space, and “features” that I (and I’m sure many others) find completely unnecessary. Not everything needs a voice over and not everyone needs to be connected and shared. Some of us just want have a collection of reference videos that we can quickly pull up and access. It’s quite disappointing because Hudl was a great app that did just that. Instead of gutting Hudl, I feel the developers should have actually talked to coaches from across different sports to find out how they use the app. Instead it feels like a group of tech guys who like to play golf got together and haphazardly through together an app that would only be specific to their needs. Oh and the pricing is ridiculous. Customer service was quick to reply and very polite. I felt like they tried to be helpful in offering time to explore the app but I was also left with a feeling that my concerns about functionality were going to be addressed at all.