Over on my personal blog I posted about how I came up with the signup complete screen (the screen that confirms that your new registration is successful). Design always starts from paper with me, so that’s what I’ve illustrated. Check it out at Sketch to Reality: Golf Trac Signup Complete.
I’ve been hard at work trying to design an organized way to expose the internals of Golf Trac to the public. Well, over the weekend, I finally wrapped this up: Golf Trac Tour.
If you’ve been curious about Golf Trac and whether or not it would provide the value you’re looking for, I recommend browsing through some of the sections. They will give you a pretty good indicator as to whether or not this is the tool for you.
Either way, everyone likes pictures. So take a look at the Golf Trac Tour.
The Dashboard is the screen that welcomes you into Golf Trac. But it’s a lot more than that. It’s the screen that gives you instant feedback about your overall game, for all of the courses you play and rounds you’ve recorded. At a glance, it’s important to be able to pull out some key information. Information that can help you improve.
The old dashboard didn’t do that. For those who can’t remember, here’s the old dashboard:
The Old Dashboard
It got the job done, but wasn’t really all that useful. You had access to 2 graphs, but you had to make extra clicks to see both. You could see your latest round, but there’s an entire section dedicated to rounds. This could be better.
So I’d like to introduce you to the revamped Dashboard:
The New Dashboard
Now you can see both graphs without clicking, and the latest round scorecard has been replaced with some very useful information, along with a small mention of your best round (for motivational purposes, of course).
It’s all about improving, and in order to improve you have to be aware of your trouble areas. Having these stats right in front of you is a step in the right direction. Hopefully you like the new Dashboard!
I’m a huge Tiger fan. Every tournament he’s in I want him to win, without question. He does some amazing things, but this weekend there was more uncertainty from hole-to-hole than ever before. And understandably so. He hasn’t played competitive golf for over 5 months. But the fact that he can play (arguably) bad and still be in contention on Sunday is rather amazing. Here are some interesting stats from Tiger’s return to golf at Augusta.
Over his 4 rounds…
So overall, that’s more than I thought he could do in his return to golf, I must admit. If you’re reading this, you probably know Phil Mickelson won the 2010 Masters. To put this in perspective, let’s compare some of Tiger’s stats to Phil Mickelson’s.
Over Phil’s 4 rounds…
So even though Tiger played so bad, he still had more birdies and eagles than the person who ended up winning. That’s pretty incredible. And if Tiger would have only had 6 bogeys like Phil (definitely not an unrealistic feat), he would have won the tournament by 4 strokes. And since Mickelson won by 3 strokes, that means Tiger would have beaten the rest of the field by 7 strokes.
If only.
Yes, Tiger has some kinks in his game. That was expected. But to see what he has done (I believe he recorded more birdies and eagles than anyone else in the entire tournament), it’s easy to see that 2010 will be an exciting year for him. I cannot wait.
Now, more than ever, good design on a website or application is becoming a must have. And for good reason. People respond to clear, crisp, thought-out interfaces. But have you ever noticed that there are several areas that still lack that freshness? Government sites are a great example of this. For instance, take a look at the Direct Loans site. There’s a ton of room for improvement.
Well, another area that lacks the attention to detail it deserves is golf. Golf on the web is ugly. The existing systems I’ve come into contact with feel more like an old Windows 95 application than they do a modern-day web application. And that’s a shame.
Golf Trac flips this on its head. Golf Trac is a well-designed and thought-out stat-tracking application. It’s filled with intuitive behaviors and pleasant surprises. It understands the problems that need solved. Golf Trac is setting the bar for golf applications on the web. It’s about time someone brings good design to golf, and one can only hope this is the beginning.
How well do you perform on Par 5’s? Do you typically do better on Par 4’s than Par 3’s? Are you hitting your greens off the tee on the Par 3’s? These questions can now be answered with the new par-breakdown. Check it out:
Stats for Par 3's, 4's, and 5's
(Ignore the actual numbers, as this is a reflection of test data)
These stats can be viewed for all rounds no matter what courses they were played on, or for rounds played on a specific course of your choosing. Very useful.
For those curious about some of the implementation details of Golf Trac,
check out the recent post called Multi-menu tabbed navigation in Rails. It uses yours truly as the guinea pig.
Technically speaking, a putt is only a putt if the ball is on the green. So using your putter from the fringe doesn’t count as a putt. And as you already know, now Golf Trac allows you to track putts.
So, now it’s possible for Golf Trac to automatically determine if you hit a Green In Regulation (GIR) based on a combination of the par rating, your score, and the number of recorded putts. For example, on a Par 5, if you scored a 5 and recorded 2 putts, that means you were on the green within 3 shots and also means you hit the Green In Regulation for that hole. If you had scored a 5 on a Par 4 and recorded 2 putts, that means you were on the green in 3 shots and would not have hit the Green In Regulation. See how it could work?
Currently to record a GIR for a hole the user has to manually click the checkbox. Some may think this is tedious and if the system could compute it, let it compute it. However, I’m not convinced that this is the best approach, because this implies (and requires) that the user enter his/her putts for a round. If putts weren’t recorded, it wouldn’t be possible to record the GIR for said round. That doesn’t seem fair.
The system is the most flexible by requiring the checkbox to mark GIR, so I think that’s how it will stay in the near term. However, I do have a dirty little secret as to how the user can get the best of both worlds. More on that soon. Stay tuned!
When I write down my scores on a scorecard, I typically keep track of the number of putts, too. If I got a score of 4 and had 2 putts, for example, I might write down 42 as my score. The 4 obviously denotes my score, and the 2 tells me how many putts I had on that particular hole. Well I also wanted to have the ability to store this information with my rounds in Golf Trac. Here’s a little taste:
What putts look like on a scorecard
I’ve combined a few different areas into one image for simplicity. The left side shows you a mini-graph of your total recorded putts, in the form of 1-putts, 2-putts, 3-putts, or Other (meaning worse than 3-putt). If you’re on your dashboard, this would apply to all of your recorded rounds. If you’re viewing your stats for a particular course, this would only apply to rounds played on that course.
The upper right is just the row of entry fields when adding putts to a round. One thing to note, here, as you type your putts, you can see that the total is summed up to the right-hand side (so far there were 12 putts total on the round, with four holes left to enter). And below that is what you’ll see when viewing a scorecard for a particular round. It also calculates the putt totals for the round, split up into the front/back nine.
Each day Golf Trac moves closer to becoming a reality. Don’t forget to Sign Up for the Launch Announcement so you can start tracking your game as soon as possible!
Something I often do is talk to my friends about how I played last weekend. It often goes beyond a simple “Eh, I was 11 over par”. Usually there are a few holes of interest, where I’ve either blown up or done really well.
It’s important that Golf Trac supports this. Having said that, I’m introducing the ability to mark rounds as public so you can share them with your friends! Once a round is marked public, all you have to do is send your friend the URL to your public scorecard. They’ll see something like this:
A Public Scorecard View
It’s a full scorecard of your round. They can quickly see your scores, how many greens you hit, how many putts you had per hole, what tee’s you played from (e.g. the Blue tee’s in the example above) and so on. The best part is, they don’t have to have an account! A user without an account would see the same thing a user with an account would see. It wouldn’t be right to keep this exclusive to members only, as Golf goes beyond Golf Trac itself.
Now you’ll have the ability to take those “how I played last weekend” conversations a step further with public scorecards! Enjoy!
