It’s often said that the best products come from when someone decides to scratch their itch. Our colleague Albert, who is an avid golfer, had become very irritated with the various devices to assist golfers on the golf course. Affordable devices always had multiple shortcomings for him; they would just never work the way he thought they should.
At our company, we are often on the road or visiting clients. As a result, we love Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch: we think they’re great lightweight computing platforms, and we use them for a variety of things.
Albert decided that he needed to create a no-nonsense golf scorecard app for the iPhone/iPod, one that “just worked” and flowed naturally to the way he thought and did.
We thought it would be an interesting experience for us to take an iPhone app through the App Store process, so we gave Albert the green light with one instruction: not to be allowed to look at any of the other golf scores on iPhone or golf tracking apps out there.
The main reason for this was to maintain the purity of Albert’s vision. We wanted to prevent Albert’s subconscious from being influenced by screenshots and the mechanics of other software. These could put images in his head that could “contaminate” his own personal idea of what would satisfy him as a golfer.
Now, this is not to say that it is not important to understand what else is available. We thought it was wise for Albert to focus on his own vision, while other team members followed the competitive landscape.
We think our strategy with Albert worked: while many of the other apps seem convoluted and have confusing interfaces, Albert naturally produced what seems to be the closest thing to the traditional golf scorecard golfers are accused of. With one look, a golfer can immediately understand what is going on.
Their app also tries to stay out of the golfer’s way. For example, while the golfer can set up the course and player information in advance, there is no requirement to do so; the golfer can simply jump right into a game and start playing without a hitch.
Albert also added full Undo capability, which surprisingly seems to be a unique feature.
We think it’s very important that golf utilities on the iPhone are easy to use. It seems obvious that the golfer wants to continue to focus on the important part: playing golf! Compared to other apps, we think Albert has done a stellar job. It seems that our strategy of maintaining the purity of vision of him has worked very well.
Similarly, for simplicity, we’re avoiding just adding all sorts of features. Instead, we are asking golfers to tell us what is important to them. Do you want to be able to share the results of your games with your friends? Do you want advanced statistics? Do you want individual golfers to be able to keep their own scores and automatically bring them together into a single set of scores?
This is one of the things that makes the world of the iPhone/iPod Touch so rewarding: fellow golfers can talk directly to developers like Albert. Where else do golfers have such unlimited ability to shape the utility of products?
By encouraging golfers to speak directly to us, we learn exactly how to make an app that fits the golfer’s needs like a glove.
Of course, no app makes it to the App Store without Apple going through an arduous review process. Many App Store developers have a lot to say about this process and tend to find it quite painful. On the contrary, we think Apple has shown that it knows a thing or two about user experiences; therefore, for us, the App Store process is an opportunity to be investigated and benefit from that experience.
Albert’s app was accepted directly into the App Store after a two-week review process. We now look forward to hearing feedback from golfers around the world.
That We have learned:
- Strive to maintain the purity of your vision. Smartly done, this helps create more simplicity than ever existed before.
- In the world of iPhone/iPod, there are countless opportunities to listen to users. Make use of these.
- There are things to be learned from Apple in the App Store review process, if one keeps an open mind.