Problem
• An outdated website with limited functionality and broken features
• Old branding
• Lack of accessibility
• Stale Content
Solution
• Rebuild website on Carbonhouse's updated platform, Showtime
Scope
• 6 - 8 months
Role
• Project Manager
• UX Researcher
• UX Designer
Tools Used
• EasyContent
• Showtime
• Basecamp
Research
Focused on internal stakeholders. The goal was to understand current pain points for the different departments and site managers. Some of these stakeholders were critical to the process as they work directly with users and could share insight into what was missing.
Explored Carbonhouse's clients. Carbonhouse is the industry standard for arts & venues and has created 15+ arena and stadium sites this year alone. I spent a few days reviewing over 25 of their sites to understand what functionality we had available to us. I created a working document with screenshots of different pieces of sites and made note of what I liked (and a few notes on what we should avoid). This allowed us to start the design conversation with Carbonhouse.
Information Architecture
Site Map. This was probably one of my favorite pieces of this project. I view a sitemap as a puzzle that requires researching your existing website's sitemap, industry best practices and lots of sticky notes to solve.
Wireframes. Carbonhouse has a template for wireframes, but we did have some flexibility to customize the site to our needs. Because we are an arena with lots of events happening, we decided on the still header with 1 large promo and 2 smaller promo spots. This allowed us to highlight multiple high priority events at once rather than using a rotating header where the user may have not seen other event listings.
Final Product
Prep for Launch
Content. All the content had to be collected and input into EasyContent before we moved into the final development phase. This phase required a lot of moving parts to make it happen. To keep track of these moving parts, I used EasyContent and a spreadsheet to organize what content had been collected, what was missing, points of contact, and more. Fast forward to prepping for the website launch - I reviewed all of the content in EasyContent to confirm everything was ported over correctly. While I didn't find anything missing, I prefer to be overly cautious to guarantee that every piece of content is in its place.
Branding Approval. I started off by collecting the brand guidelines, logos, and fonts to pass off to Carbonhouse. They utilized this information to build us our prototypes, and I used it to make certain that all the branding was correctly portrayed. Once we internally approved a final design mock up, our Partnership Manager connected with our naming rights partner for brand approval. With a partner as large as SAP, I wanted to triple check before going live. After we received the functioning website from Carbonhouse, I once again connected with our Partnership Manager to give us the green light before publishing. The reason for the extra caution here is not only because SAP is a naming rights partner, but also because branding can easily be mixed up between phases with incorrect hex codes, old logos and other potential issues.
Internal Testing. This step in the process is the most tedious but nonetheless extremely important. I checked every page for spelling errors, broken links and buttons, content checks, and accessibility. Carbonhouse informed us of an accessibility issue that we had been non-compliant with for a while and this was our chance to correct that. This issue was linking out text with the words 'click here'. This makes it hard for users with screen readers as they would only hear "click here" rather than what the purpose of the link is, such as "purchase tickets". After giving the site the first look over, I invited the key stakeholders, department heads and other members of the Integrated Marketing team to review the site and provide feedback on the above.
Next Steps
Yay, we launched! Now what?
For the website, we will continue to maintain it with content updates, new events and ensure that everything is functioning properly. We also set up a training for Showtime users to go over the backend of the site and to ensure we continue to meet accessibility standards by avoiding things such as linking out 'click here' text and images without alt text.
A new website means new assets, so the SAP Center chatbot has been updated to match the look and feel for the new site and has received content updates. We are also working on updating our SAP Persona with the Sharks + SAP Center mobile app presented by Western Digital.
