In 2017, Josephmark worked with the team behind the world champion golfer, Adam Scott, to explore opportunities to build products and services that might 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.
The Context
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.
The 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 solve that problem.
The team we were working with had vast experience across the golf industry, and helped us define the needs of industry stakeholders. To understand the golfing audience, we spoke to golfers in all stages of the game, from new adoptees to die-hard-tragics, identifying their contexts, behaviours, goals, frustrations, and attitudes, and looking for commonalities and differentiators that existed amongst them to form broad golfing personas to guide our work.
We explored as many direct and indirect competitors as we could uncover, looking at what was on offer in the world of Golfing apps, other non-digital services in the sport, and similar for other sports and leisure activities that might compete for a golfer’s time, attention, and money.
We identified a number of potential problems or opportunities we might tackle, doing our best to validate or invalidate each, before attempting to quantify those that remained. We then tried to conceptualise potential business models for how hypothetical solutions might become self-sustaining.
By the end, we’d uncovered a handful of inter-dependant problems and opportunities for golfers, golf clubs, and various other industry stakeholders in the sport as a whole.
Many of these had proven difficult to properly validate or quantify with our limited time and resources, but we also identified a few niche opportunities which the team were uniquely positioned to capitalise on due to their connections, experience and assets they had already collected towards their previous product.
These opportunities on their own didn’t feel like they could be the basis of lucrative business models. But with the help of Adam Scott’s name and media power, we felt they had the potential to achieve scale, putting the team in a better position to further assess and take on some of the more complex problems and opportunities.
The Problem(s)
The first of the potentially approachable problems we’d identified was:
#1
Golfers can’t objectively measure their longer term performance progress, beyond broad indicators such as handicap changes, into specific elements of their game.
During their previous two year process of building the Mi Golf Club app, of the many features the team had implemented, they had received the most positive feedback and excitement from the ultra-simple scorecard and statistics feature.
Through our research, we came to the conclusion that all the major products in this area were too technical and jargon heavy for the average golfer, and that combined with a name like Adam Scott’s to promote it, design could be a real differentiator in this.
The second problem we felt they had a unique opportunity to solve was:
#2
There’s no easy way to discover and compare courses in a specific area, other than by struggling with various websites and social media profiles.
Overview
The Context
The Recon
The Problem(s)