By: Derek Sung
How Xuanyi Li and Swiing Are Moving Athletic Instruction from
“Recording” to “Sustainable Learning”
Feature — Product Design & Sports Technology
I. A Beginner’s Real Dilemma
On a driving range in the United States, Xuanyi Li observed a phenomenon she would later call the “sports learning paradox”: students understood what they were told, yet still could not learn.
It was a Saturday afternoon in Chicago. A beginner in his thirties was taking a private lesson. His coach circled him, repeating the same instruction over and over: “Your hands are moving too fast — let your body lead.”
The student nodded continuously. He could even repeat, word for word, everything the coach had just said. Yet on every swing, he kept making the single most damaging mistake of the entire lesson.
After ten minutes, he began to doubt his memory. After twenty, he began to doubt his understanding. After thirty, he began to doubt himself.
Finally, he said something Xuanyi would never forget: “I’m really trying hard, but I don’t know what I’m practicing.”
That sentence became the true starting point for what would later become Swiing.
As the system’s core designer and product definer, Xuanyi started from this concrete user difficulty, identified a long-overlooked structural problem in sports learning, and went on to drive the formation of a system-level solution.
II. A Problem the Industry Had Long Stayed Silent About: No “Learning Vehicle”
The difficulty in sports education has never been that coaches teach poorly. It is that information is never saved, transformed, consolidated, or reviewed.
After interviewing more than 60 coaches, Xuanyi documented a striking underlying structure in the industry:
1) Classroom information depends on “instant memory.” Verbal explanation, gesture demonstration, on-the-spot correction, in-the-moment comprehension — students grasp it all during the lesson, but the moment the lesson ends, it all evaporates.
2) Video is scattered and unusable. The tools most coaches rely on are the iPhone photo album, iMessage, AirDrop, the coach’s own training notebook, or paper records. Each piece holds information, but none of it has structure.
3) There is no feedback system. Students take home dozens of videos but have no way of knowing which clip shows the “problem motion,” which shows the “correct demonstration,” and which is the one most worth practicing. The learning chain is completely broken.
4) Practice runs on “feeling,” not “evidence.” Most beginners have stood on the range thinking: “Did the coach say to rotate more, or less?” “Why did I mishit that?” “What am I even practicing?” The psychological confusion defeats people more thoroughly than any technical difficulty.
Drawing on these frontline observations and interview data, Xuanyi systematically defined the issue as “the problem of sports learning lacking a structured vehicle,” and proposed that what was needed was a complete learning system to carry the teaching process — not merely a single tool.
III. An Industry Growing Fast, Yet Unable to Keep Its Students
Data from the National Golf Foundation (NGF) shows that participation has grown by nearly 40% over five years, with a sharp rise in the share of younger users. Yet the attrition rate for new students within their first three months is as high as 80%.
This is not because the industry lacks effort. It is because sports education never entered the digital age — it only entered the “recording age.”
Wearable devices can record motion. Slow-motion video can record trajectory. Video can record a swing. But no tool has ever been able to record learning itself.
This structural gap not only affects individual learning outcomes; it directly constrains the efficiency and sustainable development of the entire sports education industry.
IV. Swiing Was Not Born from Technology — It Was Born from Rebuilding a Teaching System
Xuanyi did not suddenly think, “Let’s build a golf app.”
In her view, Swiing was the result of a social observation: “Coaches and students are not failing because of a lack of skill — they are failing because no one has provided them with learning infrastructure.”
What she designed was not a single-function product but a system-level innovation, intended to integrate scattered teaching behaviors into a sustainable, traceable learning system. So what she designed was not an individual feature, but a complete learning loop:
1) Structuring classroom information — so teaching no longer disappears. During a lesson, a coach can capture and annotate in real time, mark key points using a Problem / Target / Example framework, pinpoint detailed errors with keyframes, generate a lesson summary in one tap, and create a student profile. From then on, classroom content no longer depends on memory — it depends on the system. This structured method turns a teaching process that once relied on momentary comprehension into one that is recordable, reviewable, and transferable, substantially improving the stability and consistency of learning.
2) Visualizing movement problems — so students see the difference for the first time. Swiing’s Two-Golfer Compare feature is an industry breakthrough: two videos play on a single screen, synchronized side by side, so the student can clearly see exactly where the gap lies — tempo, angle, and path all made visible. For the first time, the student truly understands: “Oh — this is where I differ from my coach.” Sports learning shifts from intuition to evidence. This visual-comparison method changes the traditional teaching approach that relied on verbal description, allowing complex movement differences to be understood intuitively, and is regarded as a key innovation with a significant effect on beginner learning efficiency.
3) Giving post-lesson practice a path — from blind repetition to targeted practice. From her teaching analysis, Xuanyi proposed an “athletic-behavior chain system”: in-class understanding → key videos → learning summary → roadmap → practice review → verification at the next lesson. Students no longer practice blindly; instead, they know what to practice today, which video is the demonstration, which problem has priority, and what the goal is. For the first time, learning has a sense of direction. Xuanyi further abstracted this structure into a “Learning System,” whose core lies in turning discrete training behaviors into a continuous, traceable learning path.
4) Making learning “sustainable” — bringing behavioral science into sports education. Xuanyi integrated economics, behavioral science, and learning psychology into the UI: reducing choices to lower cognitive load; using staged goals to reduce the pain of failure; using visual summaries to increase the satisfaction of feedback; and using structured arrangements to provide a learning rhythm. Learning shifts from an ordeal into a process that can actually be sustained. This interdisciplinary approach combines behavioral science with system design, turning learning from a one-time action into a sustainable behavioral mechanism.
V. Real Classroom Feedback Was Far Stronger Than the Product Team Expected
From coaches:
- “For the first time, I feel my lessons are being ‘recorded.’”
- “Students know what they are doing, and I know what they did in the last lesson.”
- “I can now take on more students at once.”
From students:
- “For the first time, I know what I am actually practicing.”
- “I no longer panic when I practice at home.”
- “Every time I open the Roadmap, I feel I am genuinely making progress.”
From parents:
- “We can finally see what our child is actually learning.”
VI. The Data Reversed: Student Retention Improved Markedly
This is the part with the most significance for the industry:
- Post-lesson practice completion rate: up 52%
- Three-month student retention: up 46%
- Coach pre-lesson preparation time: down 70%
- Time to find a teaching video: from 4 minutes to 15 seconds
- A marked rise in the rate of meeting lesson goals
Behind these numbers are students’ confidence, coaches’ efficiency, and parents’ engagement. Something the industry had long wanted to achieve, but never had — was achieved by one designer and her team.
These results validate the effectiveness of the system-design method Xuanyi proposed in real teaching settings, and show that the method can produce measurable, sustainable impact in the field of sports education.
VII. Why Was Xuanyi Able to See These Things?
Because her background is a combination rare in the industry:
1) Training in economics — an understanding of human behavior and incentive mechanisms. Why does a person give up a habit on day seven? Why does feedback affect motivation? She can answer.
2) UX expertise — the ability to break a complex system into actionable paths. What she designs is not an interface, but a logic.
3) Sports-technology experience — an understanding of physical learning and data bottlenecks. The point is not numbers that look impressive, but numbers that are useful.
4) A global background — the ability to understand different coaching systems. The training logic of the United States, China, and Europe each differs, and she can integrate them all.
This interdisciplinary ability allows her to identify problems at the system level and propose original solutions, rather than stopping at interface or tool optimization.
VIII. The Future of Sports Technology Is Not “Smarter” — It Is “More Sustainable”
“Sports learning is not a problem of understanding — it is a problem of persistence.”
The future of sports technology will follow three directions:
Direction 1: From “displaying data” to “explaining data.” Students do not need more data — they need clearer data.
Direction 2: From “tool” to “system.” What truly changes learning outcomes is not a single feature, but a complete loop.
Direction 3: From “teacher-centered” to “learner-centered.” Sports education will no longer revolve around the coach’s movements, but around the student’s ability.
This direction aligns closely with current developments in the United States in digital education and human-computer interaction, and carries real significance for improving learning efficiency and the application of technology.
IX. Conclusion: Why This Work Matters Far More Than It Appears
Because sports education is a system about confidence, bodily awareness, and emotional security. When technology enters this system, people should not become more anxious — they should become clearer.
As Xuanyi puts it: “What I want to do is help more ordinary people stay, and keep learning.”
In an era when people grow anxious ever more easily, making learning gentler, clearer, and more continuous is itself a form of value.
Xuanyi Li’s work is not only an innovation at the product level; it represents a scalable system-design methodology — one with cross-industry application potential and the ability to generate lasting impact on both a social and a technological level.