I focused the research on internal stakeholders with the goal of understanding the current challenges for our different departments and site managers. Some of these stakeholders were critical to the process as they work directly with fans and could provide us with direct feedback. One of the main takeaways from these meetings was the importance of having promotional blocks on the homepage, especially with a focus on bag policy and parking as these were areas where fans had the most questions according to Mike, our Vice President of Guest Experiences.
Carbonhouse is the industry standard for arts & venues and has created 15+ arena and stadium sites in the last year alone. After talking with internal stakeholders, I spent a few days reviewing over 25 of their sites to understand what functionality the platform offers. I created a working document with screenshots of different elements from sites and made note of what could work for our site with a clean look and feel (and a few notes on what we should avoid). This allowed us to start the design conversation with Carbonhouse.
Before we could begin designing with Carbonhouse, I needed to evaluate the sitemap and make some necessary changes. For example, we had nine items for our top level navigation, two of which had secondary menu items. New menu items were added to the top navigation with no real concern for how it would affect the overall user experience. Important event information such as ticketing and mobile app information guides were buried in the site which limited our goal of increasing adoption of our mobile app. Finally, we could not edit our own footer navigation, and we would incur a fee for any edits done by Carbonhouse. This resulted in us adding traditional footer menu items like Fan Code of Conduct in a drop down menu. By ensuring we could edit the footer internally, we were able to make important edits like updating our CCPA Notice, Accessibility page, and other important links found in the footer. This allowed us to standardize the user experience across all of the Sharks Sports and Entertainment sites.
While Carbonhouse had a template for wireframes, I did have some flexibility to customize the site to our needs. Because SAP center hosts many different events, I decided on the still header with 1 large promo and 2 smaller promo spots above the fold. This allowed us to highlight multiple high priority events at once, when a rotating header may have led to the user missing certain listings. This also simplified the process for our Brand Marketing Manager, Malia, who deals directly with promoters. The number one request she receives is for that top promo space. Instead of adding every request to it, the limitation of three allows for her to work with our Director of Events to determine which shows get the prime real estate.
During the process of research and design, Michael and I got to work on collecting copy, images, and any other content needed for each individual page. Carbonhouse had us input this information into EasyContent, a platform built specifically for organizing content, and let me tell you, it was the greatest thing ever! We could both be in the platform working on pages, seeing what each other were doing, while I was able to manage the status of this portion of the project. Once the content was ready to go, our project was added to the queue. Unfortunately, each site takes 6-8 weeks to develop and we spent about two months waiting for production to begin, which was a major blow to all the progress we had made and our timeline to get this site live in 6 months. On the brightside, I was tasked with building Tech CU Arena’s website as well as redesigning Sharks Ice’s websites for all three locations so I shifted my focus to the next project until sapcenter.com was ready for review.
Once the site was built and ready for inspection, Michael and I went through it with a fine-toothed comb to ensure alt text was added to images, and that there was no “click here” text linked out. We tested all of the links, connected with partnerships on brand guideline approvals and more. Then we did it again on mobile. Due to the scale of this project, Patrick and I decided to connect with every department who had a stake in its success and asked them to be our second set of eyes. Any spelling error, broken link, blurry photo or any other problem that they ran into was to be reported to me immediately so it could be remedied. Since Michael and I are only human, we received a handful of small errors and one major issue - a secondary page was not linking out properly. Luckily, this was a very easy fix, but this goes to show that having those extra eyes on projects, especially for final product reviews before launching, is extremely beneficial.
