Overview:

PGA TOUR became one of the most active and sustained client partnerships of my career. Across several years of work, I helped evolve the mobile app from a collection of feature requests into a more strategic product ecosystem, supporting live tournament coverage, scoring, editorial content, event utilities, video, native widgets, emerging AR experiences, and long-term design system consistency.

The work mattered because the app was not simply another digital channel. It was becoming the nucleus of PGA TOUR's fan experience, especially as more of the audience shifted toward mobile content consumption. My role was to help the team make smarter product decisions, move faster, and create experiences that could serve core golf fans, newer millennial fans, on-site spectators, and content-driven sports audiences without fragmenting the product.

Challenge:

As the app grew, so did the complexity behind every design decision.
PGA TOUR needed to support live scoring, leaderboards, tee times, tournament-specific formats, video, articles, notifications, sponsorship needs, on-site event guides, and future personalization while still feeling like one coherent product. The product also had to serve very different moments of use, from a fan quickly checking a leaderboard to someone attending an event and relying on the app as a guide throughout the day.

The harder problem was not any single feature request. It was the pressure created by years of product growth. The 2018 strategy work identified a fractured UI after four years of added features, while the homepage discovery work showed that the business wanted the app to become more engaging, more modern, and more central to the full digital experience. PGA TOUR needed design to move beyond screen production and become a clearer product strategy layer.

Solution:

I worked across the product from both the system level and the feature level. At the system level, I helped define navigation models, homepage structures, card-based content frameworks, UI consistency efforts, and reusable design documentation that could support iOS, Android, widgets, and future feature planning. That work gave the team a more stable product language for comparing ideas, planning phases, and making decisions without starting over each time the roadmap shifted.

At the feature level, I designed and documented experiences for tournament navigation, event guides, curated content, video and casting, favorite tour selection, iOS widgets, AR course exploration, Magic Tee Box concepts, and the World Golf Championships-Dell Match Play experience. Each piece had to respect the existing app while pushing the experience forward, which meant balancing innovation with the habits users already had around scoring, tournaments, and live sports information.

The app homepage work became a strong example of that approach. Rather than treating the homepage as a static landing screen, we shaped it as a flexible content system with sections, templates, tournament states, scoring breakouts, media cards, news, favorite content, and future personalization logic. The model gave PGA TOUR a path from curated MVP content toward a more intelligent experience driven by user behavior and content interaction.

Result:

The partnership gave PGA TOUR a stronger design foundation for a product that kept expanding. Instead of treating each new request as isolated work, the team had clearer patterns for navigation, content surfacing, scoring experiences, event utilities, and platform-specific extensions. That made it easier to discuss scope, prioritize MVP work, and design toward a longer roadmap without losing the reliability fans expected from a live sports product.

The work also helped PGA TOUR use design as a planning tool. Strategy decks, discovery workshops, wireframes, phased MVP plans, production-ready assets, and design documentation gave stakeholders a clearer way to understand tradeoffs before development began. The outcome was not just more screens. It was a repeatable product design capability that could support high-visibility tournament moments, ongoing app improvements, and future-facing ideas.

Highlights:

Of the many new features created during my tenure on the project, a few accomplishments stand out. First was a greatly improved navigation system for the app overall. It was implemented, tested, and validated through Fan Council surveys, which showed an 85% improvement in app favorability. That work mattered because navigation was one of the most foundational parts of the experience, helping fans move through a complex product with more confidence, less friction, and a clearer sense of where to go next.

The next major accomplishment was creating a product direction for the app homepage, giving users a single destination for each tournament's latest news, highlights, scoring, video, and key moments. For the initial release, the experience could be curated by the TOUR team, but it was intentionally designed with the broader innovation roadmap in mind. The long-term vision was to support personalization through content interaction, favorites, tap behavior, and deep-link activity so the app could surface more relevant content without asking users to manage a complicated settings experience.

Another favorite thread was the emerging tech work. The AR explorations and Magic Tee Box concepts gave fans new ways to understand the course, player position, shot trails, and tournament context through a more immersive lens. That work sat at the edge of what a sports app could become, but it still had to behave like a usable product, with onboarding, permissions, launch points, loading states, fallback messages, and controls that made sense inside the existing PGA TOUR app.

One final highlight was designing a tournament navigation and structure created specifically for the World Golf Championships-Dell Match Play. Because the event format and scoring system were unique, the experience needed to feel fresh and tailored while still remaining familiar to PGA TOUR app users. I designed a structure that supported the match play format clearly without making the product feel disconnected from the rest of the app, and aspects of that work later influenced features in the current app experience.