PGA.com
Role: PRODUCT IDEATION • UX/UI DESIGN • DESIGN DIRECTION
PGA.com is the home of the PGA of America, the world’s largest working sports organization. The PGA owns the Ryder Cup and the PGA Championship, both immensely important events on the PGA Tour. The site went through two redesigns under my watch, with the second (2011) represented below. I was responsible for the UX/UI and many of the product ideas.
The main objective with the site was to straddle the desire of the PGA to make the site about growing the game of golf through instruction and encouragement, and the desire of most people visiting the site to keep up with news about the PGA Tour. The site basically was all things golf, making most of its money from sponsor integrations surrounding PGA Tour coverage or equipment recommendations.
Reworking scoring and sponsor integration
The scoreboard on PGA.com was the most visited place besides the home page. Like on RyderCup.com, for match play tournaments I came up with the left-right arrows and the centered leaderboard, an original match play trope which is now being copied by PGATour.com and Golf.com.
Tournament microsites
PGA.com also operated microsites for each of the 4 golf majors as well as the Ryder Cup. Because we were a small, scrappy team, I designed the sites around a very lean and configurable template which I also designed and built in HTML/CSS. We could stand up a new microsite in a matter of minutes.
Microsite leaderboard
Like on PGA.com, the leaderboard was the most visited page during a major championship. Many users kept the leaderboard open all day and it auto-refreshed every minute with new scores. Since not all users could watch live video at work (when most of the play took place) and since we didn’t have live video rights for every tournament, I came up with 5 different “storytelling modules” for the leaderboard (below on the right side). They drew stories purely from the scoring data and helped fans see where interesting things were happening apart from just the top few leaders. Within 2 years these were being copied on Golf.com and PGATour.com.
Some fans would also sit with their favorite player’s scorecard toggled open all day, so we added video (when available), social, and hole data to the scorecard to keep them checking more often.
