Approach Case Study
Timeline
5 Months January - May
Role
UX/UI Designer & Researcher
The Problem
Golfers need a way to fit improvement of their course management and mental game into their busy lives because they wish to decrease the stress and frustration they feel golfing and see better scores.
In person coaching is time consuming and expensive, while online videos are generic and difficult to make personal use out of.
The Solution
Online Coaching.
Integrate both in-depth personal golf statistics with online personalized recommended swing mechanics, course management, and mental game coaching. This web app will be an affordable alternative to hiring a golf coach and it will also be a more personally impactful alternative to reading various golf books, articles, or listening to golf instructors online.
Competitive Analysis
Hole19 and The Grint offer in-depth statistics based on your golf scores but no coaching. Imagine Golf, which offers quick and easy to consume golf mental game guidance but no in depth statistics.
There seems to be an opening to offer a product that uses a golfer’s statistics to offer online personalized swing training, course management, and mental coaching. The key to taking advantage of this opening will be to provide an easy to use web app that golfers can input their scores into. Then to then provide simple and actionable swing tips, course management, and mental focus advice based on the score statistics they have entered. Of course all of this needs to be based around an excellent user experience also.
User Interviews
Avid or frequent golfers like to do a combination of practicing their swing and their course management/mental game skills when it comes to working on their game.
However, each golfer interviewed had a different preferred method for improving their game. It is a very personal thing. Interviewees expressed a similar sentiment regarding the amount of information out there making it confusing to pinpoint what would be personally beneficial to their game. Encouragingly, all interviewed said they would pay for coaching/training to help them improve their personal game.
Interview Questions:
Do you consider yourself an avid golfer? How frequently do you golf per month?
What steps do you take to improve your golf game?
What is your preferred method of improving your golf game?
What is personally the most frustrating thing about improving your golf game?
How do you use websites or apps to help you golf?
What are your favorite features of an existing app you use to help you with golfing? Why?
What do you not like about any tools you currently use and why?
Why do you feel that course management is important to improving your golf score?
What golf round statistics do you track?
How do you use those statistics to improve your golf game?
What importance do you place on the mental side of your golf game? How do you work on improving your mental game?
Have you ever/would you consider paying for 1:1 golf coaching advice? Why?
Survey Results
Survey Major Insights
The results of the survey were very encouraging. The majority of golfers being comfortable using online tools paired with the fact that less than half actually found those tools were helpful led me to believe I was on the right path with Approach.
When I saw that every single golfer surveyed was open to using an online tool that offers personalized course management and coaching based on their own uploaded stats, I knew Approach could be useful! So, I began building out this solution to combine your in-depth personal golf statistics with personalized recommendations for swing mechanics, course management, and even mental game coaching. I feel it can bring lots of improved scores and enjoyment to users.
User Personas
I find user personas are incredibly useful in helping me to design from the user’s viewpoint.
What does Josh want from a golf app? He wants to enjoy the game more and he wants to lower his scores. But why does he want to do that, because what he really wants to do is beat his friends at golf!
In my design process, I used both user personas to guide me. Josh was my primary persona, and he played a big role in some crucial decisions, like putting the "discover courses" feature right on the home page. He's all about playing in tournaments and likes trying out new courses to stay sharp in different environments. On the other hand, my secondary persona, Earl, helped me with another important choice. He's not as used to using his mobile phone, so based on this, I decided to increase the size of the information on the course score "cards" to make them easier to read on his phone.
User Journeys
Working on User Journey maps was such an eye-opener! It really helped me understand what my users will be going through. A chance to step into their shoes and experiencing their journey firsthand.
These user journey maps helped me to develop two key features for the product. The first was offering an option to meet with the coach in multiply ways, this ended up becoming a video option and a phone call option. The second was allowing users to send chat messages to coaches instantly, offering them a way to connect quickly and easily.
Early Prototypes
I really love Paper Prototyping. In all the design work I’ve done I find starting on paper has lead to my best designs.
The ability to rapidly iterate is unmatched and designing on paper allows you to try different things you might not try in a digital space. For instance, I had initially planned to stick with just recent scores on the home page, but thanks to paper prototyping, I quickly experimented and added multiple features, which turned out to be a great move.
However, digital prototyping is immensely important to my design process as well, it gives me the opportunity to truly see what works and what doesn’t work from my more ambitious paper prototypes. Take the coaching page design, for example. On paper, it seemed solid, but when I recreated it digitally, things got confusing because all the options were the same size. So, I had to backtrack a bit, back to paper prototyping, and redesign the coach main page with a clearer top-to-bottom hierarchy. I’ve found that using the relationship between paper and digital prototyping is key to creating my best designs.
Usability Testing & Improvements
After conducting usability testing with 6 other peers and receiving feedback from my mentor, I made many iterations to my design over the period of 3 weeks, with 5 major improvements.
The Final Product
Final Screens
Here are my final screens for Approach! I'm really pleased about how they turned out. After usability testing, I made some major improvements. One of the new updates is the coach chat UI, now featuring a text field with options to share images and stats with your coach. Plus, I revamped the stats page to give you a quick snapshot of the stat you want to see, thanks to some valuable feedback from two of my users during testing. I won’t be done here though, there's always room for more improvements. Next up, I'll be working on building a flow for playing a round of golf and adding even more golf apps. Feel free to click through the prototype below.
Clickable Prototype
Style Guide
I find style guides very pleasing to create.
Creating an organized guide for future designs is a highly rewarding process. Developing this guide later in the project allowed me to create cohesion in my current design, ensuring that all aspects of the product's style are in harmony.
Reflection
This project was a big undertaking for me, I began it with great confidence and was humbled along the way. I gained so much knowledge about the end to end process of user experience design. Below I’ve gone into more detail on a few things that really impacted me.
Paper Prototyping. I learned that with paper prototyping it is important to just create anything! There is no need to be perfect with an idea. It is best to just run with it on the page to see if you like it. A big takeaway I had was understanding that none of it is permanent and that you should make mistakes at this stage (lots of them!) I also found taking photos of my sketches actually turned out to be very useful in organizing my sketches later on in the digital space.
Drawing Inspiration from Other Apps. Drawing inspiration is such a tricky path to follow, you in no way want to copy or steal another's work and yet it is impossible not to be influenced by similar projects to yours. I learned that it is vital to draw inspiration from similar work and from what would seem to be dissimilar work. For example I took some information architecture ideas from “The Grint”, however I found there needed to be some refining from the options/information that app offered and I worked that into my design for what I feel is a great structure of information. From the app “Links” I took some of the simple layout ideas I strove to meet. And from the App “Mentorcam” I drew information to create my coach pages. I needed to add a good deal more detailed information than Mentorcam had on their coach pages so I had to work on sketches of this layout a lot. Overall I am proud of the unique work I was able to create, but am still thankful for being able to find inspiration in the wonderful work of other designers. I hope my work can one day provide similar inspiration.
Internal Bias. The most challenging part of researching this project was not allowing my own internal biases and opinions seep into the research I was doing. With the game of golf I chose a project close to my heart. This led to some challenges in trying to avoid things like interpreting answers from interviewees incorrectly based on what I desired the answer to be. Another issue I found is that I incorrectly identified the main competitor due to a personal bias for another competitor but after further research found one app to be far more popular and in direct competition to what I was creating. My big learning moment from this was to seek an outside view on the project to ensure I am avoiding this type of internal bias.
Estimating Time and Effort. A lot goes into determining the time and effort you will need to put into a project. Starting out with who you are working on the project for and what their expectations are. Once I feel I had a good understanding of what the goal of this project was I then begin to plan for the amount of effort it will take. I judged this based on my past experiences and how much effort a particular project took. This led me to be a little too bullish on my timeline expectations. And I found that there was really no better teacher than experience for getting good at estimating project timeline and effort needed. One tool I really liked to use was a Kanban Board. It allowed me to have all my tasks in one place and break things down into more manageable chunks. Overall I know this is something I will continue to be better able to estimate the more and more projects I do and this project helped me take a huge leap forward in my understanding of it.
Thank you for very much looking over my work here, I had very exciting times working on Approach!