After playing for 48 years in Oakland, The Golden State Warriors (GSW) announced their decision to move to San Francisco to have the Chase Center as their new home.
The Chase center opened its doors after $1.4 billion of finance, offering different attractions such as an outdoor plaza, shopping spots, restaurants, a public park and luxurious suites for the Silicon Valley elite.
Being in San Francisco, the goal to provide a technology-fueled, innovative experience to the fans and community is a strong driver for The Chase Center executive team and the GSW, who aimed to set a new standard for sports arenas in the US.
In April 2019, GSW decided to partner up with Wizeline in order to design the market place for suites: Suitexchange.com, with the target of launching the site for the inauguration of the Chase Center stadium in September 2019, with the goal of achieving the following objectives:
Benefits for Suite Owners: Ability to maximize their ROI, coupled with a simple and easy process of letting out their suites.
Benefits for Fans and Buyers: Enjoy one-of-a-kind, immersive, and luxurious experience coupled with an extremely simple process for booking suites.
Benefits for the Golden State Warriors: Unlock new revenue sources, engage with new fans and buyers, and increase the satisfaction of current Suite Owners, while leveraging a world-class e-commerce experience and analytics dashboard.
I was assigned as the Design Lead of the project (2 UX Designer and 1 UI Designer) and, first point of contact with the client, this project allowed me to improve my negotiation and leadership skills through the process.
My call to adventure started with planning the onsite with the client, to gather as much information about the company: processes, OKRs, teams, collaboration, as well as setting the expectations of our partnership.
Following Wizeline's structured creative framework, GSW executive team gained visibility and understanding of the end-to-end user experience in the Arena with its multiple touchpoints, as well as visualizing parts of the service in detail that they had not considered as part of an overall experience, such as Catering, Parking, ticket management, and suite management.
They achieved this user-centric approach by creating an Experience canvas and a Service Blueprint (As is and To be state), developed during a 1 week workshop at GSW offices in SF.
The main stakeholders had a high-level vision of the holistic service they were intending to offer including all the experience details with a potential impact on the user experience. However, they did not have any real customer’s feedback that shed light on the degree of importance each part the service could have in their experience. Without this information it was impossible to prioritize their time and resources to focus on the features that could deliver more value for the users and by consequence the business.
To overcome this challenge, I applied a qualitative research to learn about the customers, reduce uncertainty and minimize the risk of failing the product-market fit.
Through this research they discovered differences between people depending if they were buying regular tickets or tickets from the suites section of the stadium, this suites were owned by other people. They uncovered that the suite owners had clear challenges while selling their seats when they were not planning on using them. After some analysis, they realized that helping suite owners sell their seats and people buy from them was a great way to reach their business's goals, and with this in mind they were able to prioritize and focus on a concise and achievable project.
The maximum challenge given the nature of the project the most difficult thing was the planning and recruiting of the participants for the interviews since they were high profile people in which it was difficult to reach the quota of participants (8) for each persona, and get the schedule so that they could participate in the interviews. It was a joint work with the GSW team and explaining very well the reason and purpose of the interviews.
After gaining shared understanding between the product team and stakeholders regarding the focus of the project, the next challenge to tackle was moving from the problem to the solution space and devising ways to define a product tailored for the specific user that meet the business goals in a technically feasible way.
The tool of the trade the team decided to leverage was scenarios for the personas, such collaborative scenarios sparked the imagination of the team to define a frictionless experience, which was translated into content models which is a map that describes content objects and relationships of the system that will be developed. This collaborative work together with the white-boarding sessions were a key part of the success of the project, with which we obtained alignment and synergy between design and development team.
Once having the sessions and worked the wireframes we pass to validate the concept, the Design Team, move quickly, recruited users, prepared scripts and ran tests on their prototype. From those test they could see first hand the user's reactions, gather qualitative insights and were able to iterate their proposal fixing all the interactions where the users struggled to accomplishing their goals, By testing in this stage, the GSW executive team potentially saved a lot of resources by detecting problems on time, before the product got developed and launch.
The key branding challenge the team faced throughout the project was defining a strategy to differentiate the platform, owned and operated by Chase Bank, from the Golden State Warriors, the main host of the stadium. Accomplishing a successful brand strategy would lead to customer loyalty and improve the awareness of the customers to the Chase Brand.
To achieve this, we worked with the brand distillation process to extract the essence of the product. The Chase branding was used as a basis, to give confidence to users, we worked with the brand attributes to reflect secure - open - exclusive - attainable. Therefore we use colors, shapes and images to achieve this.
After running usability testing to refine wireframes, and have the style tile selected, we started the high definition phase on the screens, at the same time having collaborative sessions in the team to review the hierarchy and principles once the UI was applied, we also had sessions with the development team to see what framework would be used and to adapt the design system in this, applying best practices.
Having the main screens in UI we ran another round of usability testing, this time we use using guerrilla testing.
After running the usability round and getting answers to some online questionnaires, we discovered that for the Owner and Buyers the filters were not so necessary to have displayed on screen and also for suite Owners they lacked the ability to filter the type of actions related to their suites, so we made another round of ideation and then to iterate on the screens to improve the experience, resulting in a 50% optimization of time in the handling of transactions visualization in the suites as well as the ease of filtering by type of preferred action to Owners, through another survey show more happiness in their journey with the changes applied.
The customer expected in the first quarter 5 transactions completed, having 25 transactions in the first half of the quarter an a big win.
Efforts were also optimized by the internal team of GSW in the administration and sales of Suites by Owners who call to obtain a higher ROI, the GSW sales team reduced from 12 to 7 people in charge of sales and contact with Owners Suite.
Unlock new revenue sources for GSW team, engage with new fans and buyers, and increase the satisfaction of current Suite Owners, while leveraging a world-class e-commerce experience and analytics dashboard.
A new opportunity for Suite Owners to generate a greater ROI of their suites when they do not occupy it, facilitating this through a secure and smooth platform.
It also generated a very good relationship between the client GSW and Wizeline resulting in the signing of the contract for V2 and V3 and a new opportunity to modify the existing product a bit to scale it to different venues and have something like an Airbnb for suites in different sports sectors.
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My biggest takeaways
On the one hand it was a satisfactory experience to achieve and exceed the expected results from the client as well as work for a recognized firm likes GSW, without a doubt I improve my communication, negotiation and leadership skills as well as a reminder that collaborative work is essential in any project both with the client and with the different internal areas such as the development team.
Something that I would have liked to do differently was the fact that at the beginning our efforts were both in the product and in the service, during the user research phase we clarified the assumptions in this area seeing a great area of opportunity to improve the experience from the part of the service, which was not possible due to the tight timeline we had, we let the customer know and they definitely have it in the plans for V2 or V3 but I feel we could have started to improve that part from now.
Thanks for reading it.
