Grow the Sport: Using Design Thinking and Usability Testing to create a Disc Golf Application
Savannah Dill
There are currently 2.8 billion social media users worldwide (Gallagher, 2017). This means that more than a third of the world’s population is using some form of social media to communicate, making social media one of the most prominent forms of communication today. “Effective communication makes it easier to manage teams, set goals, track progress, solve problems and encourage innovation” (O’Neil, 2018, para. 1). However, when it comes to sports communication, few applications exist that allow for non-professional players to collaborate and communicate in social media settings.
One sport that has shown tremendous growth within the last decade is disc golf (PDGA, 2018). Since its inception in 1976, there have been more than 115,563 active players in the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA, 2018) and likely a plethora of unregistered players. Each year, disc golf brings many new feet to the trails on local courses. Played much like traditional golf in terms of rules, scoring, and etiquette, disc golf differs in that players throw a specialized plastic disc off the tee and eventually putting into a chain-catching metal basket. Applications such as UDisc and websites such as DiscGolfScence help users by implementing mobile scoring and tournament locations and include many other features.
"Ultimately, this project is intended to encourage healthy habits and social interaction through an interactive application with which a wide population can engage. It will aim to improve player statistics, as well as propel communication within the community."
Like many emerging sports communities, disc golf benefited from the rise of social media. The changing media landscape facilitated innovative forms of disc golf organization and allowed a range of upstart media – such as YouTube channels, online news sources, podcasts and blogs – to cover all aspects of the sport. Since the earliest disc golf groups emerged on Facebook in 2007, the number of active groups increased uniformly between 2008 and 2015 and stabilized in 2016 with a total of 3,471 groups (Woods, 2019). “The sport also gained prominence in media. Over the last two decades, local newspaper coverage of disc golf increased faster than coverage of ninety-two other sports” (Parked, 2017, para 9). These statistics have proven a definite upward trend within this growing sport.
As such, this creative project is designed to help enhance the disc golf community by using technology to engage users and increase communication in novel ways. Through design thinking, empathy research, and usability testing, this project will explore the possibility of using a mobile application as a mechanism for engaging users in an immersive experience meant to improve communication among clubs and during tournaments, as well as to encourage blooming friendships and allow individuals to track their on field progress in areas such as form, drives, and putting. Empathy research will be used to discover users’ perceptions about current disc golf mobile applications, the disc golf community, and communication standards. Following these sessions, design thinking strategies will be employed to envision a user-centered experience intended to enhance communication within the community. Finally, the results from this work will be used to develop a mobile experience that will serve as a hub for the local disc golf community.
For example, one possible result may be a disc golf application that provides players with a place to engage with friends, track their personal scores, engage with local clubs, and sign up and investigate tournament information.