Reshaping Stadium experience
App design which helps sports fans to provide a better engagement and personalized experience.
Skills: Research, UI design, UX design
Transforming the stadium experience with digital technology
In the competition for sports fan business, stadiums face tough opponents, high-definition TVs. Ticket prices to visit stadiums are overvalued for sports fans who have built comfortable “digital nests” at home with large TV screens, surround sound, and commentary. How can stadiums bring the sports fans back to stadiums from their couch?
Since the fourth industrial revolution is boosted with pandemic, digital transformation of stadium experience is inevitable. Some sports teams are already started to adopting the digital technology into the stadium with great result of increasing visitor’s satisfaction and growth of revenues. New York City Football Club (NYCFC) has one of the lowest numbers of average attendance in 2021 among 27 clubs. This app I am introducing helps sports fans to provide a better engagement and personalized experience to fans.
As an UX/UI designer of the project, I extensively worked on user research and created a user friendly interface design from the ideation to development of the project.
Problem statement
New York City Football Club fans visit Yankee stadium not only to watch the game, but also to enjoy the other experiences at the stadium including food, tailgate experience, and purchasing merchandise. However, the experiences are very inconvenient and dissatisfy the visitor’s overall experience at the stadium.
Hypothesis
An application that helps sports fans with their journey at Yankee stadium including providing the shortest route to your seat, estimated wait time for restroom, express pickup and delivery of concessions purchased through the app will upscale the value of the stadium experience and enjoyment of the game
Secondary & primary researches
Secondary research and primary research including user surveys and interviews were conducted to understand the users and their experience watching sport games. From the research, we were able to discover several characteristics of the visitors:
People visit stadium not only to watch a sports game, but also to socialize
The most important reason is still to watch games and visitors don’t want to get disrupted from it.
Visitors look for the right value of the experience that matches with what they pay for.
Visitors don’t want to waste their time.
Personas
Personas were created to align on strategies for moving forward and identify goals based on the user research. This helped me to build empathy and develop the focus.
User flow & information architecture
From the research, we found out that concession experience is the most frustrated experience at the stadium. So with concession experience as a main feature, we created a list of user stories.
User flows and information architecture based on main categories for user stories were created to identify users’ essential path and how user stories will operate the app. The architecture was updated occasionally to optimize the information and services more accurately and matches with the users’ needs and behavior.
Design style guideline
Before dive into the development of prototype, style guideline of the app was created to establish consistent visual design. The guideline was started from the NYCFC’s design identity to provide cohesive look and feel which matches with the team. But instead of following the NYCFC’s identity 100%, some details were updated to avoid the old trend such as CTA style and font style.
Wireframe progression: order confirmation page
Image below shows progressions for the concession order confirmation page of the app. The page was designed with the idea to show detail of the food item users choose. In order to serve a better user interface, the page was updated with better customization options after usability testing.
Conclusion
With the goal to design a solution to resolve users’ pain points and legacy at the stadium, I dived into every process and was able to understand the UX design and industry.
I am looking forward to design the other features of the app including ticket management and merchandise purchase and find a way to connect the product with the business initiatives of the sport team.
