Well, hold onto your hats, folks, because I’ve got an electrifying tale to share! Brace yourselves for the exhilarating journey I embarked upon with the sensational startup, Trophy Golf.
And guess what? I’ve gone above and beyond to capture every single moment of this epic adventure in a YouTube video series!
If you’re ready, get ready to see something amazing! Here’s how this project happened.
Here is the shortened version of what happened in our first week:
- Day 0 – An onboarding call with the client to get some of the technicalities of the product
- Day 1 – Setting up a mood board and competitive analysis
- Day 2 – Style Exploration
- Day 3 – Style presentation and initial feedback
- Day 4 – Initial flow (Game creation)
- Day 5 – Game creation and client feedback
The Process
In most cases when working on a project you’ll follow a double-diamond framework, which is great. Until you can’t spend 2 weeks on research.
That’s why I’ve always been a firm believer that the best process depends on the type of the project and your timeline.
In this case, we had 3 weeks to design – EVERYTHING.
I chose to look at Reddit and Facebook groups and understand what people are looking for and what we need to have and also I trusted my gut.
If you develop your eye for design you will know 90% of cases what makes a good design no matter if you have industry knowledge or not, in which case I haven’t stepped foot on a golf course.
Day 1
When starting a project there are two things I always do regardless of the timeline.
- Mood boarding
- Competitive analysis
Mood boarding
When doing the mood boards I focus on the look and feel, but not for the entire project. Sometimes even small elements can convey the feeling I want it to have.
I don’t need to make it super fancy, especially since we had a limited timeline.
Competitive analysis
The goal of this step is to look at what other apps in the space are doing and try to understand what can we do better.
The best way is to play with the apps, but also a good way is to look at Reddit or other forums what people are saying.
A great way is to look at the app store ratings and look for the positive and negative comments.
Day 2
This day we had one simple goal. Come up with the color and initial style based on the mood board that the client approved.
To be honest, this is one of my favorite parts of the process. You can go wild to explore new concepts and colors.
Since this is a mobile project I focused on the hardest flow to solve and made it clear to the client that these are not final – but a direction.
Day 3 to 5
After an initial client call after day 2, I tried to keep in sync with them on day 3 as well based on the updates I did and looked for quit approval so we could get to production.
The method of this week is – to design at a rapid speed.
When doing this we can make a lot of mistakes, as we are following our gut. This can be good or bad and it was a risk we were ok to take.
What to avoid
One thing to avoid in these early stages is building a design system. I think in your exploration it’s completely useless, especially since you have no idea what elements you will have nor if this is the final (if there can be a final) version.
Working in this fast-paced environment can push you to your limits, but it’s refreshing trying to come up with something you don’t truly understand.
If you want you can tag along and see how this project unfolded.
Watch week 1
Watch week 2
Watch week 3
