Minnesota Golf Association Site Redesign
How do you modernize a website without losing its beloved charm? Finding the balance with the Minnesota Golf Association website.
Url: https://www.mngolf.org
Research: Competitive Analysis, Site Audit, SEO Analysis, Accessibility Audit, SME Interviews
Tools: Adobe XD, Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, Microsoft Teams
Executive Summary
Problem-Space
Since 1901, the Minnesota Golf Association has been hosting golf tournaments and championships, managing player profiles and handicaps, and publishing the Minnesota Golfer magazine for all golfers across the state. However, as their website hadn’t been updated since 2010, they were sorely in need of an upgrade in order to provide the best experience to their members.
Our Approach
As the site was determined to be overburdened with low-functioning pages, overly-complex user flows, and poor utilization of their excellent in-house photography, we elected to build a new website completely from scratch, focusing on simplifying the site architecture, streamlining flows for signing in, posting scores and calculating handicaps, and spotlighting their photography.
A Rough Time
The MGA website had been in its current state, with only minor changes, since at least 2010, and suffered from a myriad of issues: a dated appearance, bloated site infrastructure, poor user flows, and misuse of their in-house photography.
The old MGA site was dated in its design and bloated in its content (and yes, the site appeared left-adjusted in Chrome)
Analytics data showed us that dozens of pages had low views and high bounce rates
Our first order of business was to analyze the site, deduce its overall structure, and identify what pages were and were not offering valued services to their users.
We conducted stakeholder interviews to determine what users found to be valuable, catalogued the key user flows (tournament registration, handicap calculation, etc), and used analytics data to tease apart the useful pages from the waste.
Using that research, we devised a new site architecture that focused on these key pillars: tournaments, courses, handicapping, news, membership, community, and foundation, with the ability to filter each page for men’s, women’s, seniors, and juniors golf content.
Driving the site forward
It was determined early on that an entirely new style guide was needed to bring the MGA site up to modern standards. Throughout the process, we crafted and presented:
A mood board demonstrating the best that other golf associations, magazines, tournaments, and more had done to solve similar problems
An updated color palette with more accent colors to provide a rich and consistent experience
Type samples showing how different fonts could be utilized within the new site structure and color palettes
Once approved, the process of wireframing could begin…
Type samples were presented to MGA for consideration
Onto the Green
Wireframing and prototyping began in earnest under an agile sprint structure, with batches of templates being completed, reviewed, and sent to the developers on a strict timeline in order for the site to be ready to go live before the summer 2022 golf session.
Home Page
The above-the-fold experience of the home page does some heavy lifting while still providing a pleasing visual presence:
An optional tournament leaderboard crawl during the summer golf session
Main hero image displaying a featured news item, tournament, or organization event
Carousel of other featured news items that can be highlighted by the user
Courses/Tournaments
The Courses landing page needs to provide a quick way for users to find golf courses in Minnesota while being provided enough information to make informed choices as to what to do next:
A filterable search bar allows the user to search by course name, city, zip code, and privacy of the course
Resources such as course ratings and handicap scores are also provided at the users’ convenience
Member Page
The landing page for registered members provides every metric they need at a glance above the fold, while allowing them to quickly make updates and find new events:
The main widget allows the member to see their recent scores, post scores, look up other golfers, view their stats, calculate their handicap, and view their handicap history
The sidebar allows them to see their current handicap and provides other resources
Below the fold, members can quickly see and register for upcoming events and tournaments
Hole In One
The redesigned MGA.org went live during the winter of 2021, with main features like tournament tracking being added during the spring in time for the summer 2022 golf season. We maintained an active role in providing QA support through this time to identify and fix bugs and performance issues. MSPC continues to have a thriving partnership with MGA providing ad-buys, editorial content and marketing to this day.