Sunbright Creative needed to get UX buy-in while helping X-Golf make some early product decisions. To meet this need, I created personas based on online data from X-Golf's community and conducted an audit of products with competing features— from Starbucks Rewards to mobile golf games to gym equipment. Both of these research methods informed X-Golf's earliest features.

X-Golf wanted to put easy-to-use software in the hands of their guests

X-Golf and Sunbright Creative came to me with an interesting set of challenges. They were in charge of moving a very successful franchise to North America. It was an virtual golf experience. Indoor driving-range booths, real clubs, big nets, projectors, betting, beers. And an interface so unfriendly only internal staff could use it.

X-Golf wanted to put their software in the hands of the guests. And it was too risky to jump right into designing and building. They knew the business-related pains of having a negative software experience, and wanted different. X-Golf and Sunbright Creative had some great features in mind, but didn't know the user. As well, they needed some knowledge on how to executing their vision. We knew early-stage research could get us there.

The minimum-viable persona

User personas are cool— but why can't we just start building?

A user persona is a representation of a product's experience based on their most dominant traits. It's a practical composite, with a name, that gives every part of an organization the ability understand their users. Because they're made up of real qualities your users share, a persona is a big step in understanding who your users are.

A successful implementation has employees reasoning through decisions, "I can imagine Samantha would have a hard time discovering understanding swipe-based interactions because she spends most of her time on older computers." They keep the conversation about the user, and foster a shared understanding.

We couldn't afford the time to build great personas, so assumption personas would have to do in the short term

An assumption persona is a user persona with a foundation of educated or semi-researched guesses, whose qualities are not validated. An assumption persona can be validated with census data, public surveys, interviews with your users, and, most commonly, surveys completed by your real users.

Simply put, it’s a first step in understanding who your users are.

We didn't have the budget for incentivized surveys, and didn't have the history to pull from company data. The most we had was Facebook and Twitter pages representing the few locations X-Golf had throughout the US. It would work.

So we mined Facebook and Twitter. Gathering clues from X-Golf’s online following. We conducted it from a random selection of 100+ of those users. If someone wrote a review or "checked in", we could prioritize their information a bit higher. They would have at least visited a location. And if they followed, we knew they at least had interest at one point.

Analyzing 100+ people, we were able to make some assumptions. Middle-class with kids? Less time. Young and unemployed? More time. Posts gaming updates? More technical proficiency. Posts marketplace listings incorrectly? Less technical proficiency.

For both personas, Steph and Graham, we were able to get educated guesses for:

• Age and family status
• Profession
• Location
• Education
• Technical proficiency
• Device usage
• Hobbies

Learning about X-Golf's users, however cursory, was a big step in getting UX buy-in from the company's executives. They even acknowledged missing the mark on some assumptions they had.

Of course there were some caveats with our approach. It was biased toward social media users. It was biased toward people who have open profiles. And it was biased toward the type of person who shows interest in a business via social media.

It would take some work to eventually validate and invalidate our personas, but they were a helpful start. They later informed the UI designer's work. And helped the team make early product decisions. Like deciding which features to prioritize.

We started with the questions and moved forward with a competitive, feature-based analysis of other products

There are some lovable, almost-always-correct expressions in every industry. User Experience is no different. Trust the process. Pick your research questions before your research methods. Listen to everything Jared Spool says. Don't listen to everything Jared Spool says.

So we picked our research questions before our research methods. Thankfully X-Golf and Sunbright had a successful model to work from, and clear business needs. They just needed to know how to execute the first few features needed for the player experience.

1. How do users register and check-in with software at brick and mortar businesses?
2. How do popular applications attribute statistics and measurements to user profiles?
3. What does a good experience of a loyalty program and app rewards look like?

From there it made sense to do a competitive feature analysis for each question. It would involve looking at examples, and developing findings. Findings could include opportunities, faux-pas, observations and discoveries.

But why look at other platforms and services? We could always start with your own solutions, after all.

It's expensive solving it yourself. Many problems that X-Golf wanted to address were solved by other platforms. We could develop better solutions after understanding those that exist already.

It can identify opportunities and avoid mistakes. Looking at competitors would help X-Golf make the right decisions before, rather than after, development. It's easier to make changes before it's built.

Findings can clarify what is and isn’t industry standard. Competitive analysis helped them to build experiences and interactions their users would already be familiar with.

We discovered many products and experiences for research, but as much as we wanted to go to Disneyland, we couldn't blow the budget

Learning about registering and signing in to on-site experiences would be the most high-effort. While it would have been cool to go to Disneyland and do a deep dive into the Fastpass experience. Or even try out karaoke with some coworkers. I settled for trying out new gym equipment. And was able to get a good idea of the Disney sign-up experience just from blogs and digging through their help sites.

The good thing about looking at competitors big and small is you get to see what they're doing wrong. It was true that even companies like Disney could overlook common-sense experiences. And even gym equipment at the YMCA could do it right. It all translated to opportunities for us. To do it with less friction. With more fun.

With our questions about user profiles and displaying statistics, we'd get to look at games especially. Overwatch and Fortnite were great examples, alongside mobile golf games for reference. I'll admit I got hooked on PGA TOUR Golf Shootout in the process.

We started X-Golf off with a low-risk, user-friendly start

From there, the X-Golf team moved forward with designing and developing. With the right design patterns. With a good start to knowing of their users. And a strategic understanding of how to go about the features they had in mind. With less risk and a better understanding, it's exciting to see what they'll be able to build going forward.

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