The company

Golf Digest Online (GDO) is a leading provider of digital services tailored for golf enthusiasts. Based in Japan, they also operate other businesses such as media and advertisement, golf lessons, DX for driving ranges, score management applications, and portal sites.

GDO also hosts one of the largest ecommerce golf shops in Japan, offering top-brand golf equipment, apparel, and accessories.

Within the company, Hirotoshi Kato leads the "User Experience Design" (UXD) team, responsible for expanding the customer base with UX at its core. The division relies heavily on user insights to personalize and enhance their digital customer journeys.

Image source: Golf Digest Online

The challenge

GDO is committed to putting customers first and delivering a flawless digital experience (DX) every time. This involves consistently finding and fixing areas that need improvement, making sure the experience of each of their digital platforms evolves and adapts to their customers’ needs.

With such a diverse range of services, tracking these needs requires constant testing and optimization. For GDO, traditional methods like user tests and customer satisfaction surveys, including Net Promoter Scores (NPS), quickly became too time-intensive, and resource-heavy.

GDO is committed to putting customers first and delivering a flawless digital experience (DX) every time. This involves consistently finding and fixing areas that need improvement, making sure the experience of each of their digital platforms evolves and adapts to their customers’ needs.

Hirotoshi Kato

Director of the UXD division at GDO

The solution

To tackle these challenges and maintain the quality of their digital services, GDO turned to Contentsquare's Experience Analytics, using it in 3 main areas.

1. Testing during the development phase: by integrating Contentsquare into the development environment, they can collect user behavior data directly from the test site.

2. Improving existing services: the UX Planning and Service teams meet every 2 weeks to discuss and A/B test improvements based on Contentsquare analysis results.

3. Optimizing the mobile app experience: analyzing Session Replays from app users makes it possible to see problem areas, understand their causes and make targeted improvements.

This powerful Contentsquare platform helped them identify pain points causing negative experiences and abandoned journeys across their platforms, then address them in the ways that made the most sense for their customers.

Streamlining the user testing process

User testing is typically a resource-intensive process for GDO. So when they were launching a new golf course reservation system, they wanted to simplify and streamline this process using Contentsquare.

Typically, GDO would only conduct user tests with 5 people due to limited resources on-site, but with the Contentsquare platform and digital testing, they were able to work with 78 people.

They conducted 2 types of tests

1. Asking users to complete a reservation in a specific journey

2. Letting users play with the reservation system without any guidance— a so-called “monkey test.”

Insights from Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis revealed that users were looping back around on the confirmation page before their journey was complete

Next, the team used Journey Analysis to analyze the behavior of the 78 users, which revealed looping journeys during the booking process, right at the confirmation step.

To understand why, they turned to Session Replay.

Contentsquare’s Session Replay shows users receiving an error message that their entry was incomplete

Session replays revealed users were seeing an error message, followed by “the start time is sold out.”

This confusing message made users go back to the previous page, a step that the page structure didn't allow, causing them to drop off. What’s more, 15% of users reached the error page without looping, due to a system error. Previously, the team had used a different tool but found it inefficient and lacking in privacy protection.

With Contentsquare, they’re now able to narrow down the specific recordings and areas that are likely to be problematic and have a major impact on the business, and then watch replays of user behavior to determine why that problem is occurring.

By using Contentsquare to test the system ahead of launching their product, the team was able to

• Uncover UX issues that would have likely been missed otherwise

• Reduce friction and create a seamless customer journey

• Help customers achieve their goals and minimize abandonment

Increasing booking conversions

One of the services offered by GDO is the ‘single person reservation’, which allows individual golfers to form groups and play rounds together.

To reduce abandonment of the application form and increase conversions, the team used Zone-Based Heatmaps and found that some users were browsing to the bottom of the page.

After analyzing the click-through rate (CTR), they discovered 2 key issues

• Users were abandoning the application process: the click rate for the "Book" call-to-action button was significantly lower than the "I accept the precautions" checkbox, with abandonment rates of 40% for new users and 53.8% for existing ones.

• Users were clicking on non-button areas: a notice about reservation completion conditions was clicked 7.69% of the time.

The UX planning team analyzed click-through rates to understand why users were not completing their applications despite browsing the page.

Using Session Replay, they could see that after checking the "I accept the terms and conditions" checkbox, users reread the terms and conditions on the page or tried to go back to the previous step in the reservation process.

This suggested that users on the application page were confused, and unable to understand the service’s functions and precautions before making a reservation.

With more visible description links, the GDO team saw a significant increase in CTR on the applications page.

Based on these insights, the team conducted an A/B test, making the booking process more intuitive by updating the top header image and making the description link more visible. The goal was to reduce drop-offs and increase conversion rates—and it worked!

Conversions on successful form submissions increased by 2.6 points on the new version of the application page.

Improving mobile app UX

GDO turned to Contentsquare yet again to analyze their golf score management mobile app and pinpoint bottlenecks before its launch.

A typical golf course has 18 holes, and users input their scores after each hole to complete the round. However, the UX team noticed that many users were exiting without saving their scores, rendering the app useless.

They used Contentsquare's Journey Analysis to follow the user journey through the app to see what they did after completing their game. The team discovered that

1. Users were receiving an error message stating that data could not be saved because some information hadn't been entered, even though they had filled in all required fields.

2. Users who encountered these errors were following a repetitive journey of reviewing the scorecard and trying to resubmit.

3. This led users to repeatedly return to the scorecard entry page, ultimately leaving the app in frustration.

This Contentsquare dashboard depicts GDO data collected at the 18th hole to see what users did in the application after completing their game.

GDO realized that the reason for this error (framed in red) wasn't because of their score but that the people they were playing with had not entered all of their scores

Watching replays of user sessions allowed the team to confirm which areas were causing friction and better understand why users were struggling in the first place. They could see that the error was not due to missing scores from the user but rather from their playing partners. A small dash indicating this missing information was easily overlooked.

Additionally, the app was designed to track only the user's scores, not those of their companions.

Thanks to Contentsquare's customer insights, GDO quickly identified and resolved the issue, significantly improving the user experience and making sure that users could accurately save their hard-earned scores.

The Results

For each strategic change, GDO used a data-driven and customer-centric approach, making optimizations based on insights from Contentsquare and having a powerful impact on their processes.

• More efficient customer behavior analysis: Contentsquare helps GDO analyze vast amounts of user data quickly and effectively, reducing the time and effort required for traditional user tests.

• Hypothesis-based improvements: by pinpointing specific user pain points and testing ideas, Golf Digest Japan can make the changes that truly matter and lead to measurable business results.

• Cross-departmental usage: Contentsquare's user-friendly interface allows different departments—including marketing, design, development, and sales—to access and use insights to continue optimizing each customer experience.

We hope to make "looking at UX" a part of our company culture, whether it be the marketing team in charge of campaigns in the business division, the designers working on the UI, the development team that creates the products or the sales department that is responsible for revenue.

Hirotoshi Kato

Director of the UXD division

What's Next for GDO

GDO has yet to uncover all of the opportunities Contentsquare has to offer. They plan to expand platform use across their services and make UX improvements a core part of their company culture.

Team members from various departments will use Contentsquare to see firsthand what their customers experience, understand the full context of their actions and make improvements from their perspectives, setting a new standard for exceptional digital experiences.