Overview

The Seahawks are one of the most visible things in Seattle, and their fan base, 'The 12th Man," are some of the most vocal fans in the NFL about their love for their team.  It currently takes 12 years to become a season ticket holder.  Game days are as much a part of life in Seattle as rain, coffee, and evergreens.

Unfortunately, there is a huge disconnect between the way Seahawks fans feel about their team, and the way that they would feel about the Seahawks' app. The app is not only difficult to navigate, but a simple task like buying tickets is complicated, and connecting with the team and its fanbase meaningfully is next to impossible. The information architecture is weird, all of the media is repetitive, and most of the things that the app can do are done more quickly by Googling.  There is a big green and blue opportunity for betterment, and my team and I wanted to be on the field for it. 

Scope of Project

A 2-week sprint

Role

Researcher

Value of Project

Currently, the Seahawks generate $400 million in annual revenue. Seattle is a city known for tech innovation as much as for its ear-splitting fan base. The app for the NFL team that represents the city should be a tribute as much to Paul Allen, the team's owner, as to the Seahawks' dedicated fan base.  At least one of the features proposed by this sprint could potentially generate millions in additional revenue for CenturyLink, leading to an important economic impact for the city.  Apart from the business potential, it should be as easy for a diehard fan to love the app as to love the team.

The Kickoff 

As team researcher, I decided that the best way to design an app with the fans in mind was to educate myself a on both the NFL and the franchise. 

A Brief History of the NFL 

• The NFL was founded in 1920 as the American Professional Football Conference.

• It had its first televised game in 1939; there were 500 viewers (.02% of the US population). For context, 34% of the US population watched the 2017 Super Bowl.

• The NFL has the shortest season of any professional sport in the US, but it has the highest average game attendance of any league in the world: 67,000.

• It has been the most popular sport in the US for more than 30 years.

• More food is consumed on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other American holiday except for Thanksgiving, making it an unofficial holiday.

Reasons to love the Seahawks

• The team was founded in 1975.

• The only team to compete in both the NFC and the AFC.

• Alternative suggested mascots: the Running Salmon, the Rainbeams, the Pachyderms, or the Washington Georges.

• CenturyLink Stadium, set a Guinness world record in 2013 when fans of the Hawks emitted the “loudest crowd roar at a sports stadium” ever documented by generating 137.6 decibels’ worth of noise, or a 1.5 earthquake.

• The team has both the shortest quarterback to ever win the Super Bowl (Russell Wilson), and the first legally deaf defensive player in NFL history (Derrick Coleman).

Screener Survey

The team created a screener survey to find out if/how people were using the Seahawks app. If our users were fans who didn't use the app, we wanted to know why. 

Survey summary

• 58% of our users were moderate-extreme Seahawks fans

• 13% attended between 1-4 games per year, but more than 50% watched 9 or more games per year

• 82% of users had never used the Seahawks app

• 33% of users used another sports app

• Users of either the Seahawks or another sports app tended to use these apps to check scores or to read articles/ watch videos

Competitive Analyses

With few users engaging with the existing app, I decided to look at who the competition was. I analyzed the apps that were used by the most people in our screener survey: ESPN, NFL, The Score, and Sportscenter.  I performed a qualitative analysis that compared: aesthetics, ease of use, navigation, onboarding, and ability to keep a user informed. 

I did a click analysis to see how quickly each app directed users to desired information. 

Last of all, I summarized each app and determined it's best overall feature:

NFL: The home page has ‘Top Stories’ with appropriate media and the option to add your favorite teams. It has an archive section that goes back to 2011.

     Best feature: Analysis about who is going to win which games for the week.

ESPN: You can pick your edition of ESPN from 11 global networks. The screen is divided between ‘scores’ and ‘news.’ The app has very distracting advertisements.

     Best feature: Easy to navigate between multiple teams/leagues; ideal amount of individual teams and statistical analysis.

The Score: You can easily choose the sports you want to follow and choose your favorite teams. You can choose to receive updates on breaking news and scoring updates.

     Best feature: If you are using the app while one of your favorite teams is playing, the score of that game scrolls with you.

Seahawks: Too many clicks to do just about everything. Every page seems to have the same repeated media. You can’t buy a ticket without scrolling through all previous games.

     Best feature: The injury roster is in a prominent position.

Usability Test of the Current App

I conducted further interviews with biggest Seahawks fans from our screener survey. I ran them through a series of tests to pinpoint the app's pain points for users.  

tasks

1. Finding tickets already bought to double-check seating

2. Buying tickets

3. Reporting an incident at the stadium

4. Getting directions to the stadium and traffic information

5. Finding the highlights from yesterday’s game

From this second round of interviews, I was able to isolate the following pain points: 

Building a Persona

Combining the personas

Everyone on the team sketched a proto-persona, and they had a few things in common:

• Persona attends several games per year

• Persona is a lifelong Seahawks fan

• Persona wants to easily be able to manage his tickets

• Persona loves social aspect of games; wants to replicate it whether he's there or not

Our Proto-persona: 

Developing our proto-persona helped each of us to craft individual problem and solution statements, which we workshopped into our project's problem and solution statements. 

Design Studio

The team participated in a design studio to determine the direction for the Interaction Design and the Information Architecture. We were particularly looking at building out scenarios for:

• Buying tickets

• Ordering concessions

• Social media

• Proshop

Making Concessions

Century Link Stadium has 33 concession vendors which sell everything from french fries to pho'.  Designing a way to order from any of these vendors using a mobile device was going to require some planning. 

recommendations based on other food-ordering apps 

• I looked at Eat24, GrubHub, and PostMates

• All of them had ‘Search’ and ‘Filter’ in the upper right corner

• Eat24’s main screen is divided between ‘Restaurants’ and ‘What’s Good’

• Pullout menus versus categories

• Consider having a pop-out like ‘Today’s Special’ 

Creating categories 

I made a list of all of the food available at Seahawks games, and categorized the foods that appeared at four or more vendors as ‘popular.’  Every other category of food appeared at at least two of the stadium vendors.

Because items like fries, chips, popcorn, and nuts appear at so many vendors, I recommended they be listed as  ‘Snacks’ on the ‘Popular’ menu.

I recommended that the first design iteration would have 'Popular' foods as the main screen. We'd have to run a usability test to see how users would respond. 

Popular Foods

Asian

BBQ

Beverages

Burgers

Hot Dogs

Snacks

Soup

Usability Test 1 

Users were easily able to buy a ticket and were complimentary about the ease of the process. However, suggestions were made about how to order food:

1. What if I want to buy more food?

2. Can I scan my credit card?

3. What does the '9' mean?

4. Make 'Buy Concessions' a navigation option in both 'Buy' and 'Game Day'

Usability Test 2

Testers easily found 'Buy' and had fewer initial comments about changes to be made. However:

1. Users still thought that food categories were a weird mix of specific and non-specific

2. Users thought the timer clock should say 'minutes' or something similar

3. Some hesitation between going to 'Buy' or 'Game day' for concessions

Usability Test 3

The icon of a shopping bag was changed to an icon of a drink with a straw, which users easily identified as the place to buy concessions. Final changes:

1. Add a confirmation screen after purchasing an item to clarify timer icon

2. Add a search so people can easily find the food that they want

Hi-fidelity prototype of Final Iteration of Buying Concessions 

Video courtesy of Dominic Martinez

Results

There were noticeable changes in the reactions to how people viewed the concessions ordering app between the first and third usability tests. We went from having people not understand how to confirm their seat to place an order, to those whose only question was about buying beer. People loved the ease of buying tickets, even though most of what we did involved sending users quickly to TicketMaster.  I think that we spotted an important opportunity for the stadium to generate a lot of money as well as jobs and found a fairly straightforward way to go about it. Given that a person can only use this function on the current app if they are at a game and in the Club section, I have no idea how it is actually done, but I think the team devised a fairly easy way to do it.

Problem-Solving

We had a concept to create a way to improve the app experience for the casual game attender through geofencing and offering experiences unique to being at a game.  I feel that designing an app to go with the game day experience can really enhance it for the average fan, who just wants to make the most of being at CenturyLink for game day. We didn't achieve our goal as thoroughly as we could have, given that we had big plans to build out the social functionality, that would allow users to share their game day story and photos from their stadium location with friends at the game, but I think we addressed the some issues of a fairly disparate app pretty well.

Surprises

I’m not a big sports fan and I still don’t think of myself as much more than a casual fan of the Seahawks. They simply play in the city where I currently live, and I respect how they bring the city together. Even given my lukewarm feelings, it was a lot of fun to work with a team about a team and to isolate problems that needed to be addressed. It was also a really cool social experience to spend more time than I’ve ever spent before thinking about what it is that motivates casual and serious fans alike to make a game day an experience.   I had more fun on a theoretical project than I would have thought possible.

There are 33 vendors at the CenturyLink stadium selling concessions as diverse as sushi and vegan hot dogs on gluten-free hotdog buns. I still cannot believe how posh the options at CenturyLink are.

What I learned

Teamwork can be the best professional experience of your life if you are able to play to your strengths, and your team is able to do the same. I love research, Dom loves visual design, and Kristin could wireframe for hours, so by putting our strengths to equal use, we achieved something to be proud of. I learned that group work doesn’t have to be unbalanced and universally terrible.

Even in a city like Seattle, an app directly tied to one of the city's most visible attributes can still be in need of better design.  

I’m lucky enough to be friends with a Seahawks season ticket holder- and I didn’t know it until this project. Tess is one of my closest friends in Seattle, but even so, her 27-year history with the team had never once come up, and it made me realize that there is probably a lot to learned from the community of Seahawks season ticket holders.