🏌🏾‍♂️ PGA Tour: Design Process  

👨🏾‍💻  My Role

I was responsible for taking our strategic goals and bringing them to life through a series of connected experiences designed to make the PGA Tour easy, fun and memorable for fans.

Overview

We were asked to provide data collection on attendees of PGA Tour events by driving app downloads so the organization can offer better sponsor value and targeted customer experiences. 
We can do that. 
But we also noticed a deeper problem: focus had drifted away from what fans want to what sponsors want. To find the win-win for fans and sponsors, we went back to the drawing board.

Project Goals

Skills & Methods

  1. Increased on-site fan engagement 
  1. Increase use of mobile app for ticketing (purchasing and redemption) — currently only 2% of tickets holders can be identified
  1. Reduction in food, beverage & merchandise wait times by using mobile payments
  1. Improve on-site navigation
  • Information Architecture
  • Wireframing
  • Usability Testing
  • Digital Prototyping
  • Systems and Feature Design
  • Visual and Interaction Design



🕵🏾‍♂️ Discover

To get an idea of what our PGA fans experience, we had to look at all touchpoints in the PGA journey, and this came out to three stages:

  • Pre-event → During the event → Post event

After doing this, I mapped out the fan journey for each part of the event to be able to name painponts our fans experience. What we found is that going to a PGA event is similar to a travelers very first visit to New York. Each new course, and each new tour, you see different amenities, layouts, players, rivalries, environments, and more… It can feel like a dozen simultaneous events are happening.



Once I completed the journey map, I performed a heuristic audit of the app to find the next set of pinpoints. I highlighted a few screenshots of my audit process below:

The following are the painpoints that emerged from my discovery phase:

App Painpoints 

Event Painpoints

  1. Low utility
  1. Poor on-boarding
  1. External linking to mobile webpages 
  1. Lack of cohesive visuals
  1. Lack of consistent IA
  1. Menu items are tucked away & UX copy is confusing
  1. Ads everywhere (breaks your concentration on task completion)
  1. Crowding
  1. Long wait times for food, beverages & merchandise
  1. Exhausting 
  1. Confusion with wayfinding 


I was fortunate enough to work with Ryan Conner & Julian Grimes on this project, two phenomenally talented brand strategists who led the charge on research to find more blindspots PGA might be missing. We conducted phone interviews with, and sent surveys to PGA fans that attend(ed) their events.

General Industry Findings
  1. The first & newest thing that stood out to us was Most importantly, a younger audience is interested in golf [source]” 
  1. In addition to 6.4 million 18- to -34-year-olds playing the game today, golf has another 12.2 million who express real interest
  1. As age increases the number of hours and usage of apps on mobile devices decreases [source]