When I joined the San Jose Sharks in January 2022, there were four personas in the app with only one receiving the attention needed to be beneficial to our users. That same year, Tech CU Arena was set to open as the San Jose Barracuda’s new home. Add in our three Sharks Ice locations into a persona and SAP Center as the fifth, the app was overflowing with personas that lacked useful information due to being short staffed from the pandemic.
Chris, Patrick and I began to discuss reducing the number of personas and agreed that we were duplicating our efforts by putting information for SAP Center on the San Jose Sharks persona and vice versa. In addition to this, the priority fell to the San Jose Sharks which left the other personas with stale content and lacked helpful information for users which made the app an unnecessary item to have downloaded.
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? These are the two questions that kicked off the research phase. I dove head first into the 15+ apps on my phone to see what, if anything, other teams were doing to solve these questions. The two team and venue combos I was most drawn to were the Golden State Warriors and Chase Center vs the Milwaukee Bucks and Finserv Forum. I had a seamless experience while navigating through both of them with sample questions as if I were the user attending an event such as what is the venue's bag policy or where do I park? The entire experience flowed very naturally and allowed me to discover other essential venue and team items like upcoming events, ticket packages, food and beverage, and merchandise.
This research kicked off additional conversations with the team around what other teams are doing and what we wanted our experience to look like. We went through multiple rounds of user journeys until 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 an event at SAP Center?
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.
Once we had the wireframes, it was time to plug in the content, add our branding and bring this concept to life. As mentioned before, we were merging SAP Center and the San Jose Sharks personas. What I haven’t told you is how we were going to merge them. With the San Jose Sharks persona being the most frequented and most well kept, I suggested that we replace the Tickets tab in the bottom navigation to host the new SAP Center experience. I specifically recommend this tab because we also have a Schedule tab which allows users to purchase tickets. This was a redundancy that was taking up valuable real estate in our app, and I knew it could be used better.
This project started after the redesign of sapcenter.com which was the first step to understanding our goals as a company as well as our users. The way that users interact on web and mobile can be very different, but we wanted those who were attending SAP Center for a Sharks game or other event to be able to find exactly what they needed in a matter of minutes whether they were on our website or in our app. Using the website’s new sitemap and understanding what the most important information was to our users was crucial to helping shape the app experience. While working through this for SAP Center, I was also considering Tech CU Arena and how I wanted that experience to look and feel. Ultimately, I landed on the same layout with some minor edits for items that were not available at that venue. The reason for the consistent experience is because I wanted our users regardless of which venue they are attending to find what they need, in the same location on mobile, whether they were attending a Barracuda game or a Sharks game.
