100th PGA
CHAMPIONSHIP

The PGA Championship is one of golf’s beloved majors. The Championship this year was celebrating its 100th anniversary and stability along with a best of class experience was expected. The suite of products includes watching LIVE video and accessing LIVE scoring data access across responsive desktop experiences, iOS and Android apps and Roku. When fans were on course, they could locate their favorite players, personalize their experience to get a variety of scoring or location notifications and read in depth analysis from the games top reporters. Whether on the go or at home used as a second screen, fans could stay on top of all the action LIVE and follow their favorite players throughout the tournament.

Goals

We had 3 primary goals to achieve. Our typical business goal to increase revenue through growth in video engagement was a given. In order to achieve this and give fans a good experience we needed to 1. Increase stabilization with the platform 2. Get users a cleaner, quicker and more accessible experience giving them the content they were looking for when they were looking for it, and 3. strengthen collaboration with all stakeholders across the multidisciplinary teams. I took on the task of facilitating and design results around #2 and #3. I’ve listed many of the contributors that I worked with who impacted what the users experienced in order to show the breadth of the contributors/collaborators that made the experience possible. I had the privilege to make sure all were thinking about the user and their needs and facilitating sessions to keep sight of that.

Turner Sports in partnership with the PGA

UX Lead: Luther Lotz
Creative Director: Randy D.
Design Director: Molly G
Product Design: Megumi D. & Darren W.
Technical Lead: Brian E.
Development: Nick P, Neil S., Jarrik A., Clara, Zack A. & Possible.
Product Management: Allan N. & Quiana W.
Editorial: Mike B
Social Media: Jason W.
Multimedia: Jeremy L.
Sales: Joanna L., Ali S.
Sponsorships: Micheline S.
Marketing: M.A .
Analytics & UX Research: Mordecai B., Ligja G.
+ PGA Partners

Background

Collectively as a team we believed that by providing a more stable environment and enjoyable experience for casual and avid golf fans would achieve better reviews and more time on the platform. We knew it would be so when the numbers grew in time spent and longer engagement within the experience. Stability discussions first began with our engineering and product teams. Then, joined with UX & Design, our now balanced team determined how to bring new and simplified ideas to the table that allowed the dev team to use technologies already implemented.

Discovery

We knew our fans. The year prior we redesigned an entirely new site, new apps and moved to a new CMS all at the same time. All that work was done in a short amount of time and left some core features needing some rework. I conducted empathy mapping sessions and shared user understandings we gathered from user testing session around their journeys and content they sought out. Collaborating with my lead UX researcher, her and I designed tests to uncover any new insights that we may have missed in our user testing leading up to this years event. We decided on user interviews after the homework tasks we provided were completed. Some of the new findings we uncovered in those sessions were associated with our scoring and leaderboard features along with some additional observations within our LIVE player experience. That gave us more insight into how to move forward.

Scoring

In order to get as many options as possible, I decided to facilitate the team-at-large through some design studio sessions together. A Design Studio session consists of time boxed brainstorming for each person individually that is then presented to the team with a critique session after that. We then came together to do one last design exercise with the team as a whole with the newly gained team insight. This allows for new perspective to be heard, prioritization to be done and the team starting out on the same page. This was helpful in our team strengthening goal and help increase trust and collaboration. Everyone on the team was thrilled to take part, to feel included and to have a stronger sense of ownership in the product. We did this for all of our key features we were retooling. Scoring and LIVE Video are shown here. Additional areas we worked through were in regards to our on demand content strategy, personalization, notifications/alerts plan, social media and AR/VR experiments.

LIVE Video Player

Iterations and testing

Collaborations with the designers on this project resulted in many designs and approaches. The highest ranked ideas that met our goals were then tested and iterated upon before going to hi-fidelity design and development. Below the team-at-large is doing some guerrilla testing using a script I created. It was important and highly successful to have the team conduct this test together. It helped give everyone on the team the understanding that they are not the user and was an extremely important lesson in empathy with the user. The session was recorded (audio/video and screen interactions) with lookback.io and later reviewed and analyzed to be shared back with the team to understand and learn if we were on the right track.

Results

The results were impressive. We achieved the goals we set out for the product and perhaps more importantly for the team at large. The team was working on all cylinders and stress and anxiety were considerably down from years past. Some stats that attest to this are:

• 15% increase in uniques

• 119% increase in LIVE starts

• 27% increase in LIVE Hours

• Best weekend in history (largest audience, most live starts, most live hours)

• Attracted the largest digital audience ever

• All platforms experiences YOY increase with mobile web leading the way

• happy user reviews

• Emmy nomination

The team delivered and growth was seen across all the KPI’s we were tracking. As a bonus (and minor goal), the work we created got us nominated for another Sports Emmy. It was a fun project with a great team.

Next Project

Music to their ears