The Challenge and Context
As the lead designer, this was a project I worked on and off with (depending on company priorities) for around two years from start of research to release date. The biggest challenge of this project was to circle in on the user needs that had to be met from first release date and what could be added later on. Other challenges this project phased was the cross team collaboration were each team had its own roadmap and product managers needed to align and I as the lead designer had to be vocal in what the users needed.
Solution Strategy
I knew from the start that this was going to require multiple teams to collaborate which would mean a lot of time spent aligning on requirements. So I started my research with sending out a survey to cover as many different golf ranges' needs as possible. In the end it got over hundred answers from multiple countries around the world. The purpose of the survey was to get more data on the needs and wants of the users when it came to what problems they wanted solved and what was more important than the other as we knew we couldn’t do everything. It became clear that some needs were bigger than others such as; seeing results, but also, being able to schedule events, customise it to their facility and so on. After the survey I followed up with some more deep dive focus groups, pairing range owners from different parts of the world up (except for Japan which I had to do using a translator) in order to get more understanding of the problems they faced with the current solution in place.
When the requirement work started I had a lot of knowledge about what the users felt that their businesses needed in order to run in a better way and/or increase their revenue. This lead to a more user centric approach in the discussions on product management level. We aligned on what problems we wanted to solve the with our event management system in the first version but what took time in the end what how to solve those problems.
Since this was a cross team project, I decided that a collaborative approach would be best internally and set up several workshops in the beginning. This in order to assure that everyone got the same information and took part in the decisions made along the way to avoid follow up meetings and getting everyone on the same page. Even though quality was of high priority in this project, it couldn’t take forever. I worked a lot with visualising user journeys, mapping user needs to different touch points in our products the user had today and what it would be in the future. I created sub personas based on the maturity of the golf range and how their needs differed to always have something to circle back to in our conversations. I also involved architects and tech leads in order for them to start thinking about how this would fit in to our tech stack and architecture in place.
I collaborated with designers from different teams working on different products when it came to wireframing and bringing the project to life. I performed user tests in order to tweak, confirm and find problems with the concept we had going. In close collaboration with QA we had our use cases mapped out and how we wanted the feature to be used. When it came to prototyping I used Figma and relied heavily on best practices taking inspiration from other event management systems and office products using components from our design system. I also made sure that the whole flow followed Norman's principles about feedback and constraints due to the feeling of a 'binding contract' when you are both creating and event and signing up and making sure that the user felt in control throughout the journey.
Outcomes and Impact
Once released, event management started being used right away around the world. It is not every project you have the luxury to have this much research going in but it really helped in the final parts of the project were we could easily circle back to the user needs. This feature helped businesses run smoother but also more frequent golf events and by extension, letting more golf players enter events, thus increasing their own revenue.
Key Takeaways
- Approaching a project with a holistic mindset takes more time but often results in a higher quality result
- Dare to stay in a phase longer than you feel comfortable with could be worth it in order to gain clarity on how to proceed
- The more people involved, the more time it takes to come to a decision, and it is worth it to not rush it
- Designing for everyone is impossible, but if you never lose touch with the users and stay true to the core needs, it is possible to design for a wide user group