Project
The PDGA app is the official platform for competitive disc golf. Scorekeeping, course discovery, player ratings, and tournament management. The sport had grown. The app hadn't.
The Ask
Competitors had lapped it. At sanctioned events, players were pulling out third party apps to do things the official platform should handle. The ask was a ground up redesign, built for the course.
Discovery
Shadowed players across three full rounds, ran surveys from the .com site, evaluated competitors, and performed a UX audit. Score entry happened on the go or after the round in bulk. The app required 6 to 8 taps to log a single score. Glare, cold fingers, and a clunky interface meant players were missing inputs constantly. Most just kept score on paper and entered it later. Crash performance was a recurring complaint in survey responses.
Key/Core Personas Established
UX Audit Report Card
Competitors
Strategy
If the target gets bigger, it's easier to hit. MIT Touch Lab research puts the average fingertip at 57px minimum and the old app ignored that entirely. Fix what was broken first: crashes, slow score entry, touch targets too small for cold hands on the move. Then modernize navigation and course discovery. Then close the gap with competitors on features players had come to expect. Everything in the redesign flowed from that order.
Experimentation
The flow revealed that starting a round required finding a course first, and that a crashed or backgrounded app needed a clear resume state rather than forcing users to start over. Score entry was the critical path. Wireframes of the scoring interface went through several iterations to get from 6 taps down to 2 or 3. The big number (+/-) tap targets were not just a style choice.
Design
High contrast, sports-app aesthetic appropriate for the PDGA brand. 48pt minimum for all interactive elements. Custom score entry component reduced cognitive load to near zero — swipe, tap your score, done. Dark mode as default for sunlight conditions.
Outcome
App Store rating improved from 2.9 to 4.6 stars post-launch. Score entry time dropped from 47 seconds to 11 seconds in usability testing. PDGA reported a 34% increase in app-tracked rounds.