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.
Next, I began building out the experience in Rover. Our creative team created the Teal Together 5.0 branding that was available for me to use during the 23-24 season. Because it was created in advance, I was able to begin designing immediately and used placeholders for the final game day graphics which took a bit longer to approve as they contained our game day sponsor, Milagro Tequila. The point of this experience is A) to highlight our themed activations and B) to educate fans on our season stats. I organized the experience with game day information at the top, followed by themed activations then stats. Underneath this was any other information we wanted to include like Jersey Auctions, Sharks Pro Shop Collections and sliders for our upcoming promotion and theme nights and all of our home games. Because this information was going to update game over game, Rover helped us set up Contentful which allowed for anyone to turn on or off sections or update copy without having to access the original Rover file. They also connected NHL API’s for us so our stats were auto updated and our opponent stats could be updated within seconds.
Last season, I went off the general planning doc that was supposed to contain all finalized plans which as we learned was not 100% accurate. After the experience was tested and ready for internal review, I connected with multiple departments to have them review and confirm that their information was correct. If anything was missing, it was easy for them to identify and alert me to get it fixed immediately.
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. While Rover has a Localization feature that can translate everything for us at the click of a button. However, there are a few issues with this: we’d need to manually translate items connected in Contentful and it pulls from Google Translate so we’d have to manually review if it was correct after every update. Unfortunately, we don’t have someone on the team who could take this on so it remains a single game activation with the help of the NHL to make it happen.
