NIKE GOLF: DESIGNING A TRAINING APP FOR GOLFERS
Timeframe: 2-Weeks
Task: Product Design / New Tech Integration
Platform: iOS & Apple Watch
Responsibilities: Team leadership; Research; Information Architecture; Interface Design; Prototyping; Usability Testing
Golfers seek affordable self coaching tools to improve their golf swing. With the advent of the Apple Watch and its built in motion sensors, our team saw an opportunity to develop an app that could turn the Apple Watch into a digital coach to monitor and send feedback to golfers to improve their swing.
As part of a UX immersive project at General Assembly, I had two-weeks to develop a high level concept together with two other students. With none of us having had prior experience playing golf, we had to learn about the sport and engage several users to design for their needs. We ultimately developed this project as a concept for Nike considering they are a leader in consumer sport and wearable tech.
Project Planning
To plan our activities, our team engaged in a brainstorm session to plan out what we wanted to do and ultimately hand in. Because we only had two-weeks, a challenge was to fit enough time to dedicate to research, design and testing. To keep us on track we used a gantt chart while also delegating team members as owners of certain tasks.
Research & Discovery
Crafting the Research Agenda:
To fuel design, our team wanted to learn more about golf, how golfers train, and what technique they look at to improve their form. Based on this we crafted the following research questions and also developed a discussion guide for interviews:
What activities do golfers engage in to improve their swing?
What feedback and metrics are they interested in acquiring if any?
What are their thoughts on smart watches for golf?
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Feature Analysis (Click to enlarge)
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS:
To gain inspiration for our app we performed a feature analysis and heuristics evaluation of 6 competitors: Zepp, iTrainer, SwingBot, Arccos, Garmin and MemosSwing. We chose to do a more in-depth analysis on Zepp, Arccos and Garmin because they were the best executed. Zepp was the only direct competitor with the ability to record swing metrics and do video recording. Other products were focused on GPS and game tracking metrics - not swing training - however, they offered good insights on execution.
What We Discovered:
- Few competitors offer features to track swing metrics - currently none for theApple Watch
- Swing metrics most commonly measured are club speed, club plane, hand movement and tempo
- Most competitors focused on game score tracking & GPS
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Contextual Inquiry:
Using our competitive analysis as a foundation, our team took a field trip to the Chelsea Piers golfing range to observe how golfers practice and what kind of learning tools they use.This involved observing golfers,
interviews and a private lesson with an instructor.
Golf Lesson: the private lesson with the instructor involved taking swings at the driving range and practicing in a golf simulator to record and identify problem areas with our swing. This was done using cameras and specialized software that would draw lines overlayed on the video replay. This inspired our team to think about incorporating video and drawing tools in our app.
Golfer Interviews: We interviewed several golfers of different age, skill, and experience in person and over the phone. Regardless of experience we discovered that all golfers like to receive feedback and metrics on their performance. We also discovered many use video as a training tool to analyze their own swing, and watch and learn from professionals. Some of the pain points they experienced when using products to measure their swing (like Zepp) were that they were hard to calibrate and required pulling out a phone frequently to view metrics. The idea of using the Apple Watch interface to view stats was desirable. Furthermore we discovered the challenge golfers face to record and analyze their swing. This involved frequent trips to their camera to record and press play. Our team saw the Apple Watch’s ability to replay video and act as a remote to record themselves could solve this problem.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Golfers desire video playback & analysis: recording and analyzing own swing and watching pro videos are very effective tools.
Golfers regardless of experience like to receive swing metrics: Golfers enjoy relative metrics on their swing such as speed at which they hit the ball, swing plane and tempo.
Want an easier way to record themselves: currently rely on other people to record or need to walk back and fourth to camera to record and play.
Want quick and fast access to data - they don’t like pulling smartphone out of pocket all the time.
Liked the idea of a smart watch: as a display and control center to record themselves and view metrics.
Want to track progress: golfers want to be able to access historical data to track progress.
LEARNING ABOUT THE APPLE WATCH PLATFORM:
Right sensor capabilities but some limitations in being able to provide swing metric data
Able to use as a remote for video playback
Because this was the first time any of us designed for the Apple Watch platform, we went through the developer and design guidelines to learn about best design practices and potential technical limitations. We ultimately learned the Apple Watch had the right sensor capabilities to track simple swing metrics (like hand plane, club speed and tempo), and run video playback and remote controlling capabilities. This gave us the green light to include these features into our design.
Personas
Distilling three distinct user groups: To culminate our user research findings, we synthesized 3 distinct personas. We ultimately chose the “extremist” because they were more likely to use technical gadgets like smart watches to improve their game.
DEFINING THE
FEATURES
Crafting a brief on what to design: Based on our research insights we wanted to include the following features golfers desired:
Measure swing metrics using watch sensors
Display swing data metrics on smart watch interface
Ability to use the smart watch as a remote to record self
Ability to track progress over time
Training videos from professionals
DESIGNING & ITERATING
Early Concepts & Designs
Using our research findings as fuel, we began our design process by individually sketching out ideas on how the app could look and work. We then engaged in a design studio to share them and decide on a final flow and user journey.
Our team spent time sketching out ideas on the user interface, interaction and flow. We would later share these internally to narrow down and test concepts out with users.
We built two flows depicting the steps the user would need to go through to record and analyze own swing, and another where they would only look at their swing metrics after a swing.
To give our product context, we built a simple user journey depicting how the user currently goes about recording their swing and high lighting the pain points to solve for.
PROTOTYPING &
TESTING EARLY DESIGNS
Experimenting with different UI and Flows
Using Marvel we created three medium fidelity prototypes to experiment designs on the Apple Watch.
- Gestural approach focused on delivering more content on fewer pages
- Hierarchical approach leveraging a familiar menu style navigation
- Gestural approach focused on minimal content per page with more pages
Before engaging in tests, we tried it internally with a golf club in hand to simulate the experience. This allowed us to troubleshoot and modify the design before testing. Following this we tested out the prototypes with golfers. Based on their feedback we chose the navigation based prototype (2) to further our design as it was the most intuitive. However, users also liked interface elements of the other designs so we worked on building them in.
BUilding out iOS Wireframes
& INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Develop iOS app and interface to integrate with Apple Watch app.
iOS interface for managing settings, account and viewing/analyzing data in more detail.
Realizing the interface of the watch is small, we wanted the iOS to be a more detailed display for users to access, organize and analyze data. The features we decided to incorporate for the iOS app were the ability to filter information based on date, club, metric and video. We also explored ways to visualize this information more graphically via charts, graphs and reports. Since Nike already has an established iOS golfing app with a dedicated training section, we decided to integrate the Apple Watch app and features as an extension to this section using existing design elements.
