A library of high-quality course flyover videos really helped bring Pin to life.
In 2017, Josephmark worked with the team behind the world champion golfer, Adam Scott, to explore opportunities around products and services that could support and sustain the game holistically.
We worked together for most of the year to build and release Pin, a golf scoring and stats app aiming to bring statistical performance insights to even the most amateur golfers. The app also featured a rich discovery experience for their database of over 40,000 golf courses around the world.
Pin launched in the App Store in November 2017
Project Kick-off
We were initially approached in late 2016 to undertake a performance and tech audit of Adam Scott’s Mi Golf Club, an iOS and Android app that had seen only a limited beta release after two years in development, which was being built by members of the Scott family business with various design and development contractors.
Upon reviewing the app, we identified what we felt to be some significant UX and product strategy issues, and proposed a two week‘Recon’ engagement to deep-dive into their app, their user-base, and their industry, and advise them on potential solutions.
Screens from the original Mi Golf Club app
Product Recon
Myself and Jared Fossey, a then newly hired design strategist at Josephmark, spent the next two weeks performing Josephmark’s first‘Product Recon’ – trying to do as much research and analysis around the product, it’s potential market of users, and it’s industry context as was possible in a limited time.
Our goal was to learn enough to be able to identify particular problems that could be defined and validated for an existing market of golfers, and to make a recommendation whether or not the client should continue trying to work towards solving that problem.
We worked with the MiGolfClub team to define persona based segments of audience, to explore existing and potential business models in the industry, and to get a high level view of the existing Golf-app ecosystem.
By the end of the two week, we’d uncovered a handful of inter-dependant problems and opportunities they might be positioned to navigate, and had developed a broad vision for how that might look, and how we might get there.
Context and behaviour based golfer personas
Golfer and club facing business models
Full Swing
Having received the go-ahead, I formed a team with Designers David Whipps and Hamish Snow, iOS Developer Michael Henderson, and Project Manager Anson Cheung, to begin further defining the problem, while tentativel exploring the solution space.
Problem #1
The strongest of the problems we’d identified which the team might have a unique ability to solve was:
Golfers can’t objectively measure their longer term performance progress, beyond broad indicators such as handicap changes, into specific elements of their game.
Through our research, we felt that all the major products in this area were too technical and jargon heavy for the average golfer.
Of the many features in the existing Mi Golf Club app, an ultra-simple scorecard and statistics feature had received the most positive feedback and excitement from beta users.
With a name like Adam Scott’s to promote it, we felt that a finely tuned interaction design could be a real differentiator in this product space.
Problem #2
But there was also another problem we felt they had a unique opportunity to solve:
Project Kick-off
Product Recon
Full Swing