Market & Context
The golf tech space was crowded—but fragmented. Players had options for GPS yardages, digital scorecards, and swing tracking. But those tools lived in silos. None integrated the full on-course experience—let alone offered real-time food ordering, environmental data, and staff-side analytics in one seamless loop. Drift Golf’s vision was more ambitious: unify player tools, course ops, and revenue channels in a single platform.
But building something better wasn’t enough. The industry wasn’t exactly eager for change. Golf courses are notoriously slow to adopt new software, often locked into legacy systems or wary of expensive upgrades. Drift’s solution had to be not just more advanced—it had to be drop-dead simple, cost-effective, and low-risk for course operators. That meant designing with zero hardware dependencies—except for one clever exception: a wind sensor that mounted to the top of carts, aggregating ground-level data across the course to power hyper-local weather insights. It was innovation with a purpose—and a Trojan horse for adoption.
Brand & Product Limitations
There was no UI. No patterns. Just a big, brilliant idea and a blank canvas. Our job wasn’t just to design an app—it was to invent the entire Drift Golf experience from scratch: the UI visual identity, the interaction model, and the emotional tone of a product that had to feel intuitive from the very first tap. And while we were pushing into new territory—real-time ordering, live weather overlays, side-game tracking—we still had to anchor the experience in familiar touchpoints. This wasn’t just for tech-native golfers. It had to feel obvious to anyone who’d ever played a round.
Like many zero-to-one builds, the feature set kept evolving. Ideas were fluid, priorities shifted, and new edge cases emerged mid-sprint. We often designed months ahead of engineering—painting the picture of what Drift could be before the infrastructure was ready to support it. That meant we had to circle back, adjust, and sometimes rewire key flows as real-world constraints showed up. Flexibility wasn’t a luxury—it was the whole game.
Strategic & Technical Barriers
Drift Golf wasn’t a single product—it was a connected ecosystem. That meant every design decision had to work across four distinct environments: mobile phone, Apple Watch, course staff dashboard, and a lightweight admin system for menu and pin control. Each had different user needs, technical constraints, and interaction models. We weren’t just designing screens—we were choreographing a real-time conversation between golfers and courses.
The GPS system had to be accurate enough to track group locations for pace-of-play management—but lightweight enough to preserve battery and performance. The cart-mounted wind sensor introduced another layer of complexity: collecting ground-level wind data across the course, then feeding it back into the app to personalize shot suggestions in real time. And that’s before you factor in the food delivery workflow. Orders had to move seamlessly from player to kitchen to cart—and back again if anything needed updating. All of this had to work with zero backend integrations and no extra hardware for courses. Designing for that level of orchestration, while keeping the UI dead-simple, took serious intentionality.
Human & Organizational Challenges
Like many early-stage startups, Drift was running lean. Small team, big ambition, and limited bandwidth to spare. This was the founder’s first foray into tech, which meant we weren’t just building the product—we were helping shape the product culture. Prioritization was a moving target. Some days we were deep in feature mapping, others we were coaching through edge cases or translating UX decisions into investor decks. It wasn’t chaos—it was pure velocity. And it meant our design process had to flex with the moment. Sometimes we moved fast. Sometimes we slowed down to teach. But always, we moved forward.
Discovery & Strategy
We were brought in through a referral—always the best kind of momentum. From day one, it was clear this wasn’t just an app. It was an opportunity to reimagine the way players and courses connect. We kicked things off with a rapid strategy sprint and a competitive audit to map the terrain. The takeaway? Golf tech was crowded, but fractured—full of single-purpose tools that didn’t talk to each other. Drift could be the glue.
We defined what the product needed to be by drawing a hard line: it had to feel like a personal caddie for the golfer, and a smart command center for the course. Not another GPS clone. Not a backend system in disguise. That clarity shaped everything. If it didn’t serve both sides of the experience—player and staff—it didn’t make the cut.
Concept Development
Our early concept work focused on what would set Drift apart—not just functionally, but experientially. We identified three core ideas to build around: real-time ordering from the course, live wind data aggregated from cart-mounted sensors, and integrated social games like Skins and Match Play. No one else was threading those into one experience. That became our edge.
We anchored the UI around the metaphor of a modern golf cart dashboard—on your phone. Yardages, pin positions, wind, score, snacks—everything right there. Big buttons, glanceable data, minimal distraction. We weren’t designing an app. We were designing a digital co-pilot.
Conceptually, we treated the product as a conversation between the golfer and the course. Every interaction triggered a response. Update the pin—players see it. Order a sandwich—kitchen gets pinged. Drive through a gust—your club suggestion changes. It all worked because the interface was invisible. The magic happened underneath.
Design Execution
We approached Drift’s visual system with clarity and control in mind—building an interface that felt both premium and practical. The color palette centered on soft neutrals with bursts of high-contrast orange—used sparingly, only where it mattered. Yardage numbers, active states, wager sliders—all got just enough visual punch to stand out on a sunlit fairway. Typography was custom-tuned for legibility, even mid-swing. The result? A product that looks calm but performs loud.
Interaction-wise, we kept the hierarchy brutally simple. One screen = one moment. The GPS view prioritized critical data: distance to pin, wind effects, temperature, slope, and a real-time “plays like” adjustment. All shown without clutter. The satellite mode let players visualize shots like a pro—complete with trajectory lines and club recommendations based on historical play. The scorecard, meanwhile, balanced rich stats with a casual vibe—designed for easy reflection post-round, not just performance review.
On mobile, the experience was immersive. On Apple Watch, it became glanceable. And for course staff, we translated the same design DNA into a more utility-first layout—focused on speed, reliability, and operational clarity. Even the most casual user could check wind shifts or send a sandwich in under five taps. That was the measure of success: a pro-level tool that never felt overwhelming.
Build & Integration
We designed entirely in Figma—but didn’t stop at visuals. Every screen came with interaction notes, behavior specs, and scalable component logic built right into the file. Our system was structured to serve both speed and precision: autolayouts, named styles, variant-based components, and handoff-ready flows that made life easier for engineers. No guesswork, no cleanup.
While we didn’t touch code ourselves, we worked closely with the development team throughout. Weekly check-ins, async reviews, and real-time questions handled in Slack kept the feedback loop tight. The result? Almost zero design drift in implementation—and a final product that matched the vision pixel-for-pixel.
Collaboration & Workflow
This was more than a design engagement—it was product leadership in action. We helped shape the roadmap, prioritize features, and guide decision-making through every sprint. While Drift had engineering talent on hand, our team brought the creative discipline and executional clarity to move things forward fast—and in the right direction.
We ran weekly sprints with clear checkpoints, async design reviews, and flexible documentation that could scale with a remote team. The core team was based in Canada, but our process was built for distributed speed: Figma prototypes, Slack threads, Loom walk-throughs, and real-time feedback loops. No bottlenecks. No blockers. Just a team aligned around making something great.
Drift Golf didn’t just ship an app—they launched an ecosystem. What started as a bold idea became a seamless, dual-sided platform that golfers and course operators genuinely love to use. We helped them go from zero to one with clarity, speed, and creative control—building everything from product architecture to visual identity to end-to-end experience. Today, players can track shots, feel the wind, place an order, and play a side game—all in one tap.
More importantly, the work unlocked momentum. Drift secured new partnerships, gained early traction with course pilots, and earned recognition from Alberta Innovates and the startup community at SXSW. It proved what we always believed: when tech meets simplicity and story, you don’t just build a product—you move the whole sport forward.
From pin to pint, we designed the future of golf.
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(2010-2025)