A mobile app for Finland’s oldest golf club
Located in the maritime landscapes of Espoo and Kirkkonummi, Sarfvik Golf is Finland’s oldest shareholder-based golf club. It is known for its high-quality courses, good service, and peaceful environment. Together with the creative design agency Kuudes, we built a mobile application for the oldest golf club in Finland.
Features of the app
The promise of Sarfvik Golf is that “there is always time”. This means that you can enter the range without planning ahead and without making a booking. The new application reinforces Golf Sarvik’s brand promise and shows how the customer experience even in a very traditional industry can be renewed with user-centric design. The service brings the golfer’s gaming experience to a new level: the app allows you to check the queue situation, the weather, and the number of players who have started a round in the last hour. The information provided helps golfers decide if it is a good time to go on a tour in Sarfvik.
The app’s users also receive notifications about exceptional conditions on the courses. This way, they can stay up-to-date on course conditions, including maintenance and upcoming competitions. Notifications help users make game plans on a weekly basis with the help of news, events, competition calendars and restaurant information.
– Sarfvik has long been a golf course leader in Finland. The app has received good feedback from its users, engaging existing club members and attracting new players. Kuudes and Evermade have been our partners in the development of the Sarvik brand and application, and it was natural to continue our cooperation in developing our services as well, says Sarfvik Golf’s Staffan Tuomolin.
The app can also be used without logging in. For new visitors, a course map can come in in handy.
– Although many members know the courses like the back of their hand, the app’s guides can be helpful. Thanks to the app, there is no need for a paper guide, Tuomolin continues.
Technical implementation
Sarfvik Golf is an iOS and Android application built with React Native and WordPress. The application shows various data at a glimpse, like the weather and the current number of players on the courses. It allows members to sign up for rounds of golf straight through the app. It also features detailed course information, including maps and useful golf tips.
React Native allowed us to develop both platforms rapidly and cost-effectively using mostly the same codebase. Building user interfaces with React Native is fast and made our collaboration with Kuudes’ design team smooth during the development phase.
The application sends and receives data from golfsarfvik.fi, which is built on WordPress. The communication between the application and website happens through custom REST API endpoints.
WordPress also serves as the push notification management system. Our client is able to create and schedule push notifications containing messages or even links within the application, all straight from the WordPress dashboard.
We created our own WordPress plugin for all application-related features, allowing us to develop it independently while another agency is developing the rest of the website.
