Discore.io — what is it and why did we do it?
Do you know what disc golf is? Disc golf, or frisbee golf, is played like regular golf using flying discs. It has recently become a popular sport in Estonia, which now supports more than 80 disc golf courses, or one course for every 16,000 Estonians.
We discovered disc golf in 2016 and our first games involved practicing throws. At that time we were happy if we got the disc into the basket in less than five throws! However, the more we played the more we wanted to save our scores and compare them with our friends. We started to use Skoorin.com but quickly realized that this program is quite brittle,
the mobile version was not user friendly, it was difficult to find your own historical scores, and there were many features missing that we consider important (e.g., score graph, social features, and motivators to play alone).
As an IT team, we gathered one weekend and created the first beta version of the soon-to-be ultimate disc golf app that we now call Discore. Discore.io was created to provide disc golf fans a better user experience and a new option among the few disc golf scorecard apps available.
At Thorgate, we value great user experience, so we put serious effort into making sure Discore is intuitive, robust, and useful. Our goal was to make it easy to play spontaneously no matter where we were. For that we created a quick search function to find the nearest courses, an easy way to select friends to play with (or add new friends), and a super easy method of entering scores.
Because disc golf is a social game, we made Discore remember the friends you last played with so you don’t have to search for them each time, and can simply add them from a suggestion list.
We also experimented with various methods of entering scores to find one that is very user friendly. Our first idea was the following:
When we went to the disc golf course in Nõmme to test it out, we really liked standing in the forest holding own app :) However, we quickly understood that our method of entering results was not comfortable. Now we rely on a traditional number pad.
So far we have developed the following functionality:
- Creating games — course and player selection, entering scores
- Inviting new users (those who are not yet Discore.io users)
- Game statistics, including a score graph
- Your own statistics by course
- Ratings (though, at the moment users cannot see them). We try to use two different rating systems: The PDGA rating and the ELO rating — both complement each other and, when combined, bring more excitement to the game.
- Top 10 leader boards for each course
We would be very grateful if you could try https://discore.io out and give us valuable feedback. We also have an iOS app that you can download from here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/discore/id1160143224?mt=8
Please send any feedback (good or bad) to e-mail address discore@thorgate.eu.
We will consider this post successful if the currently popular platforms update themselves quicker (e.g. Skoorin just launched a new UI — https://discgolfmetrix.com/). We all love disc golf and the ultimate goal is to end up with a user friendly app whether it be Skoorin, Discore, or something else.
Thank you for your attention.
The Discore.io team is: Ivar, Janar, Kaspar, Madis, Rivo, Taavi
