PocketGolf
Your new golfing assistant.
While vacations are meant to be relaxing, a company-wide golfing vacation is bound to stir up some problems along the way, let alone a joint-company vacation. From accomodation information to tournament logistics, both the organizer of this golf vacation and the golfers themselves often struggle to keep track of everything.
PocketGolf is a custom mobile app used to coordinate golfing vacations.
Role
Journey Mapping
Wireframing
Client
Innovation Software Solutions
Duration
4 Weeks
Problem Statement
To build morale and cultivate company culture, every year Innovation Software Solutions collaborates with another local startup and attend a golfing vacation. Typically, a total of 20 individuals, 10 from each company will attend and network across four days. While golf and a vacation, or "golfcation" as they say, sound great, several things can go amiss.
Logistics for a typical vacation can be a nightmare, let alone organizing for 20 participants. In addition, with several emails being passed around, it's common for participants to miss important information. Lastly, keeping track of golf scores also poses a problem amongst participants.
How can we create a software solution to allow this annual "golfcation" to go smoothly?
Team
Collaboration is key. I worked with three other designers on PocketGolf, each with varying expertise. We each spent time with key Stakeholders and alternated interviewing them. My main responsibilities included: creation of two user personas, identifying the main user flow and assisting the team on high-fidelity wireframes.
Process
Research
Client meetings and requirement gathering to determine use cases and current pain points.
Journey Mapping
Exploring different tasks and creating personas and a journey map.
Wireframes
Low fidelity paper prototypes. High fidelity prototype using Figma.
Presentation
Presentation of mockups to stakeholders and gathering feedback to determine final outcome.
Research
During research phase, our team analyzed similar platforms, such as ESPN, to gain insight on UX of sporting apps. In addition, we researched tools related to golf, and spoke with the client about their use cases.Through this process, we identified two distinct personas, which represent different needs. Data for these two personas were gathered by interactions with potential users.
Personas
Pain Points
After gathering research and insights from the client and potential users, my team identified the following pain points:
- There is a behavioral gap in tournament scoring, and golfers often will either forget to document their scores or document their scores incorrectly, leading to confusion and disputes between players.
- There is no centralized place to store important information, and multiple emails are passed around in the weeks leading up to the event. This causes a lack of organization for participants.
- Even though the phone numbers of each participant is shared with the rest of the group, there are issues finding and contacting others.
User Flow
After analyzing the main use case of storing tournament information and scoring, I developed a user flow that further demonstrates the main task of the application.
Solution
Our solution to this problem is a mobile app, PocketGolf, your personal golf assistant. This app enables golfers to enjoy their golf vacations without the disorganization or the worry. The app is designed to have a sleek and professional look to conveniently enhance golfers’ vacation.
Tournament: Gameplay is made easier with the useful course and hole information, and scoring is kept simple and familiar.
PocketGolf clearly displays the user’s golfing information, such as date, time and course location with the tap of an icon. The course overview enables the user to view each individual hole information to strategize their play, as well as view the positioning of other teams.
By selecting the hole on the Course Overview screen, the user is able to enter to enter scores for the match. PocketGolf will prompt users to enter scores, thus preventing the user from forgetting to document their scores.The Review screen allows all four players to compare scores before submitting and fix any scoring discrepancies.
Wireframes
Lessons Learned
- The data gathered was a small subset (15%) of the users.
- There could have been more extensive user testing, but contact with ISS and users was limited to two in-person meetings and several emails.
- Creating a survey could have been a simple way to collect data amongst all users.
- The users interviews were trip organizers, which did not give us a clear prospective on all users.
- Soliciting user data would have been beneficial, especially since data existed on past attendees.
- Reaching out to stakeholders to ask for interview volunteers could have diversified our data set.
Conclusion
Due to time constraints, our team rushed into the design process. This, however, delayed our timeline, and we should have taken more time to discuss user goals and prioritzation with the members at ISS. More extensive user testing needed to be conducted in order to validate the solution.
Developing a user flow was very helpful, but should have been done early in the process. Our team’s happy path was split amongst multiple user flows, and we opted for more features than one centralized one, which affected our end product.
Even though we faced challenges, our team was selected as First Place as the Stakeholder’s choice. Our team spent the most time with the Client, and they felt our design was the most professional. Innovation Software Solutions took inspiration from our design, and used this to develop their application!
Thank you for exploring PocketGolf! Hopeful you enjoyed this case study.