Problem
• Increase ticket sales to our Promotion and Theme Nights
• Grow our audience
• Increase awareness of Sharks + SAP Center Mobile App presented by Western Digital and continue to drive traffic through Rover experiences
Solution
• Turn our Gameday Experience into an extended experience that highlights everything the game has to offer
Scope
• 7-10 days
Role
• Project Manager
• UX/UI Designer
Tools Used
• Rover
Research
Rover & Their Clients. If you were to view the third screen on my iPhone, you would see about 20 NFL, NBA, and NHL team apps downloaded. And what do all of these teams have in common with the Sharks? Not only do they have their own mobile app, but they are also all Rover clients. I have bi-weekly meetings with the Rover team, and we discuss some of the cool experiences other teams are putting out to their fans. While I get to see a few screenshots of the experience, I prefer to jump into their app and immerse myself as if I were a fan since this allows me to see and interact with the final product for inspiration.
Sharks365 Members. Talking directly with the fans, especially our season ticket holders, is the absolute best way for me to get immediate feedback to improve our overall user experience. In the off season, I spoke with a couple of members and learned that miscommunication was the biggest issue we needed to resolve to make our big games the best experience possible for our fans. During Patrick Marleau's Jersey Retirement game, season ticket holders almost missed out on a few different experiences because they were not included in our press release or in our game day experience. This exposed a larger internal issue concerning communication as I was not made aware of these experiences, so I did not know to include them in the game day experience. Without clear communication internally, our fans are certain to miss out on experiences. This told me that I needed to connect 1-on-1 with the project lead(s) to confirm what has been planned so that I can communicate it to our users.
Final Product
Prep for Launch
Testing. If you saw me in the office or at any point during this period, I was continuously switching between my phone testing out different features for this experience, chatting with the Rover team, and balancing a few other projects. We were using NHL API's to pull in data, Contentful to speed up transitioning between games, and data sources to make the experience personalized. I worked with a few colleagues to test the experience and ran into issues where some could see certain items and others could not. There were also broken links and a few other bugs that needed to be fixed before launching. This is why we test before we release to our fans. I went back to Rover with some of the issues we were seeing and continued discussing, building, and testing. I repeated this process a few more times before the experience was ready to be launched publicly.
Homepage Takeover. Working with our app vendor, FanReach, I set up this experience as a homepage takeover. This meant that any users who visited our app saw this experience instead of our typical Home Screen. This gives us the opportunity to put everything directly in front of our users so they won't miss what's happening at the arena.
Bilingual Experience. Needless to say, the start of the season was crazy. Two days after the home opener, we had our first theme night: Los Tiburones. We celebrate our community year round, but have a dedicated night specifically to celebrate the Latino and Hispanic communities. For this night, we go big and that doesn't stop when it comes to the digital experience. For 48 hours, we offered our Gameday Experience as a bilingual experience to connect with our fans on the next level.
Next Steps
2 games down, 80 left to go. I built the Gameday Experience template, and I can tailor it to fit the different theme nights. We are focused on personalizing the Gameday Experience to fit the needs of our users. While I have started the process with smaller features such as differing UI based on whether or not the user has already purchased tickets. My end goal is to offer an experience personalized to each user based on location, ticketing needs, past purchases and more.
Our problem cannot be solved with one experience. Instead, it is a problem that I will continue to solve for throughout the season using different methods and varied experiences for the big games. Tackling this multifaceted problem requires us to continue iterating upon previous solutions, thus improving our overall product in the process.
Offering our Gameday Experience in another language was an incredible way for us to connect with our fans, and is something we've talked about continuing. Unfortunately, it requires a bit more work on our end to learn how we can offer this as a year-round option for our fans. Our number one focus this season is ensuring that our experiences are accessible to all of our fans. The Spanish translated version requires us to manually update all of the details for each game, which interferes with the automation we implemented using APIs, data sources and Contentful hookups.
