Problem
• Five properties live in the Sharks + SAPC Mobile App presented by Western Digital
• Too many places for fans to look for information
Solution
• Fold SAP Center persona into Sharks persona & Tech CU Arena persona into Barracuda Persona to create a seamless game or event day experiences for our fans
Scope
• 4 - 6 months
Role
• Project Manager
• UX Researcher
• UX/UI Designer
Tools Used
• EasyContent
• Showtime
• Basecamp
To preview this experience, you will need to have the Sharks + SAPC mobile app downloaded onto your phone. When you open the app, you will land in the Sharks Persona, click the SAP Center button in the bottom navigation to preview.
Research
The Questions. What are other teams with their own apps doing for venue information - NHL, NBA, NFL, MLB, MLS?What are the most asked questions by the fans?
I dove head first into the 15+ apps on my phones to see what if anything other teams were doing to solve these questions. The two venues I was most drawn to were The Golden State Warriors and Chase Center vs Milwaukee Bucks and Finserv Forum. For me, it was the clean experience I had while navigating through both of them using questions as if I were the user such as what is the venue's bag policy or where do I park?
User Journey's. Through discussions of what other teams are doing and what we wanted our experience to look like, we went through multiple rounds of user journeys. We finally landed on three user journeys: potential ticket buyer, pre-event goer, and in-venue user. This lead us to answer one of the more important questions - what kind of experience do we want our fans to have before and during the event at SAP Center?
Information Architecture
Wireframes. With user journey's changing, so did our wireframes. At first, we thought this experience could be customized by users who were logged into the app vs not logged in and whether or not they had tickets. We quickly realized that A) this became overly complicated for something we wanted to be simple and B) leaned more into Member Portals. We moved away from this pretty quickly and went back to the beginning -- what are the most asked questions by fans. This led us to the user journeys we landed on as we realized focusing on users buying tickets to our events, the experience they had leading up to the event, and the in arena experiences were the most important. For us as an event venue and hockey team, a bad experience can cause a user to not want to return. My goal became to create a seamless experience for the users at all stages of their journey, that they don't even realize how smooth it is. As a designer, user experiences are like a joke, if you have to explain it, it's no good.
Final Product
Prep for Launch
Final Checks. All of the information gathered has been placed, edits have been made and now it's time for final reviews. Connecting with the lead from each department, a universal link to this experience was shared for each individual to test with their mobile devices. While their main focus was likely their department's content, I always ask for every person to make their way through the entire experience and to keep an eye out for spelling errors and broken links at a minimum. This allows for us to work together to move the experience across the finish line.
App Placement. After I had the all clear for internal testing, I worked with our app vendor, FanReach, to get the SAP Persona experience added into the app. In the bottom navigation, the fourth tab was Tickets and is now SAP Arena to host the new experience. We opted to replace this tab as we offer a Schedule tab which allows users to purchase tickets. This became a redundancy that was taking up valuable real estate in our app, and we knew it could be used better.
Next Steps
Yay, we launched! Now what?
Since we spent months understanding our goals and users needs, the plan is to replicate the design for Tech CU Arena. Update the branding, events, and content and BAM! we've got ourselves an experience to benefit our San Jose Barracuda fans and soon to be event goers for Tech CU Arena.
We are also focused on learning more about our users behaviors within our app. One way for us to do this is by using Conversion Tags on buttons which allows us to retarget users through push notifications. We can also track how many users are viewing the experience and which page(s) is/are receiving the most traffic. Over the next stretch of home games for the San Jose Sharks and round of concerts and other events, I will be comparing analytics to learn how we can continue to improve the users experience for buying tickets, the experience leading up to the event and the in arena experience.
