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Creating a Cohesive Golfer Ecosystem | 2017

USGA launched a series of applications allowing golfers to maintain a handicap index across multiple platforms back in 2007.  Due to declining club memberships, little investment had been made in these properties since launch.  Over the years, hundreds of golfer apps entered the marketplace with valuable features. USGA's product suite couldn't compete.

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USGA originally hired us to rebrand their mobile app, website, and in-club kiosks. We convinced them to introduce new features across platforms that would allow them to become competitive in the marketplace, increase engagement, acquire new users and minimize user attrition.

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My Role

  • Led the team responsible for Product Strategy, UX and Product Design

  • Collaborated with USGA's Executive Team, SMEs and Product Owners to identify and prioritize features

  • Developed the product backlog

  • Worked with Engineering to t-shirt size features

Building a Strategy for the Ecosystem

We began by diving into the current applications to develop an understanding of features and challenges to inform our recommendations and user interview discussion guides.

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Our deep dive culminated in a heuristics assessment and high-level observations that we fleshed-out further during discovery based on data and research.

We also conducted an analysis of existing Google Analytics data to understand click paths, which features customers were using, and those they were not.

We were able to glean customer insights from App Store Reviews, and validate our hypotheses through user interviews where we filmed real golfers struggling to complete tasks in app while explaining why they use competitor apps.

Based on our research, we created our target persona.

We also sought to understand how the competition was solving the problems we uncovered and identify ways to differentiate USGA in the marketplace.

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And held several workshops with the client stakeholders to develop a new feature set based on our findings.

"...A group of smart and innovative individuals who share a common goal in helping us get to where we need to be."

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- USGA Senior Product Owner, 10/2017

We used this information to create roadmap of prioritized features across the golfer lifecycle that informed the product backlog.

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The list of features was illustrated in a sitemap for each product and user stories were created.

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Our last step in formulating our strategy was to gain alignment on the branding with USGA's marketing team. They planned to white label the app, so we needed to explore how that could manifest.

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Working with Engineers in Design Sprints

Once the features were prioritized and agreed to, our team worked with the client to plan each sprint, create and groom user stories, concept and create clickable prototypes, conduct usability testing and finalize the UI through iteration.

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Our design team worked in two week sprints ahead of development and collaborated with USGA's development teams on an ongoing basis to ensure APIs were available and that our designs were technically feasible. 

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For each major feature, we created a detailed user flow before design ensuring usability, alignment with stakeholders and availability of data in the backend.  Once approved, these flows were quickly prototyped and tested with real golfers at local courses and improved upon during the design sprint before visual design and turnover to development. In all, over 500 screens were designed across three platforms.

Key Screens in the Digital Experience Across Devices

Website

Mobile App

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Clubhouse Kiosk 

Outcomes & Learnings

Outcomes

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Working agency-side, it's usually difficult to glean measurable results on projects since clients typically deploy the code and own the analytics. While we have no measurable results, the project led to new business opportunities​:
 

  • Our Executive Sponsor and PO introduced us to other ​teams within USGA that need product strategy and design in the future
     

  • One of USGA's SMEs moved into a senior role at another organization and engaged us for a project at their new company
     

  • Our Executive Sponsor was promoted in large part due to the "success" of this project​
     

  • Our team was scored 9/10 by USGA on our company's client satisfaction survey

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Learnings

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  • Nothing changes hearts and minds like video of real users struggling to complete tasks
     

  • If you and your client have two different visions for a user flow or screen layout - test them both and have the client observe
     

  • Be sure to include budget for an SME when designing an experience for a topic you know nothing about
     

  • Clients will find the money to fund something they believe in
     

  • Our team had never designed a kiosk before this project and learned a lot in the process

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