What Golfers Actually Look At on a Course Map

A club I worked with last year let me run an unscientific but instructive exercise: watch members use the new yardage book on the course, and note what they looked at and for how long.

The designers had spent most of their effort on the hole illustration. The members barely looked at it.

What they actually used

Three things, in this order:

• The number to the front of the green
• Where the trouble is on the side they miss
• The green contour, but only after they had hit

The beautifully rendered fairway, the tree line, the bunker shapes — glanced at once on the tee, then ignored.

This changes the design brief

If the front number is the most-used element, it should be the most legible thing on the page, and on most guides it is not. It competes with carry distances, hazard numbers and a scale bar.

The second finding was more interesting. Members wanted to know about the miss on their bad side specifically. A right-handed player who fights a slice does not care what is left. Some of the better digital guides now let a player flag their miss and emphasise accordingly, which is the kind of thing print cannot do and nobody had thought to ask for.

Green contours are a post-shot tool

Almost nobody consulted the green detail before hitting an approach. They used it walking onto the green. That argues for putting green detail on its own page rather than crowding the approach view with it — a layout change that costs nothing.

Where the flyover fits

Not on the course. Every member said some version of "I watched it once before my first round." That is a genuinely valuable job — it is the visiting-golfer and new-member tool — but it is a different job from the guide, and it should be budgeted as marketing rather than as player material.

Producers who do both, such as VueMyGolf and 3DFlyover.Golf, will usually build the flyover and the guide from the same survey, which is the efficient way round. Just do not let one brief pretend to be the other.

The uncomfortable conclusion

Most of the artistic effort in a yardage book goes into the part golfers use least. That is not an argument for ugly guides. It is an argument for spending the legibility budget where the eye actually lands.