NBA Fan Engagement

Project Overview

As one of the most successful sports associations in the US and worldwide, the NBA has a huge impact on basketball fans and pop culture. However, the NBA has been facing tremendous challenges in its fan engagement, business operations, and game spectating experience. Catering to new media technology and new game consumption patterns, we worked with the NBA to depict a vision of the next era empowered by SAP intelligence.

Project Type: Concept Design

Role: UX Research, UX Design

Duration: Nov, 2017 - Apr, 2018

Tool: Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator

Design Thinking Process

Topic

Domain Study: Opportunity - "Where are the opportunities for improvement?"

Domain Study: Entry Point - "How would SAP's technology help develop these opportunities?"

Research

Timeline - "What's the high-level strategy?"

Research Process - “How do we get closer to our users?“

This project was not easy from the beginning as our client, the NBA, did not have a predefined goal for us. The initial and the only request was ”Pulling NBA fans from other sports or entertainments back to our court”. Instead of providing a specific design solution, we focused on how to tell a good story about enhancing NBA fans’ engagement level by using SAP technology. Meanwhile, we wanted to present the whole design process, from research to deliverables, as an example to enlighten the NBA on how to provide a good user experience by going through the design thinking process.

Research Finding - “What is the right direction?“

Ideas

With these 4 perspectives of the story in mind, we started thinking about how to convert the abstract concepts into a solid user story and envisioning what the final application could be. Spending one week on brainstorming and sketching, we came up with over 20 ideas and further consolidated them into 7 main concepts focusing on several fields such as Second Screen, Mobile Streaming with AR tech, Point & Reward System, End-to-end Game Planning and more.

Idea Card - "What is the craziest idea we have?"

Lo-fi Concept - "What directions have the most potential?"

Concept Validation

We invited 10 NBA fans of different backgrounds, gender, and age for an internal workshop and guided them through these 7 “high-potential” concepts. With both positive and negative feedback collected, we validated most of our assumptions along with some surprising findings (eg: 9/10 participants enjoy watching ads)

User Story - “What does the user do and feel?“

To further validate our use cases, we encouraged our participants to tell “mini-stories” by using the “When…I want to… So that“ statement structure. With these mini-stories, we acquired deeper insight into NBA fans’ worlds including their behaviors, needs, and expectations. These mini stories helped us transform wireframes into polished hi-fi concepts.

Hi-fi Concept - "Which solution won the users' hearts?"

Workshop

Unlike other projects on my portfolio, the hi-fi deliverable is not the destination for this project. Compared to concrete solutions, it is the methodology itself that we would like to share and present to our client. As a wrap-up, we invited over 50 participants from various departments of the NBA and held a 2-day workshop in New York to share our knowledge and experience.

UX Canvas

The UX Canvas is an artifact that helped capture the NBA’s strategy behind second screens. Through a structured activity, participants identified target users for various second screen solutions offered by the NBA, fan motivations, their fears, the competitive landscape, the NBA’s competitive advantages, and the NBA’s unique value proposition around second-screen experiences.

User Empathy Map

Empathy maps helped us develop a better understanding of the target users for the NBA 2K League. This exercise helped create personas of casual and core gamers, highlighting in the process who they are, what they think and feel, and what they see and talk about.

NBA 2K Season Timeline

This exercise helped us validate and build further our understanding of the NBA 2K Inaugural season structure, the various events, target users, fears and expectations of the League, and the important milestones throughout the NBA 2K calendar.

6 Hats Ideation

Having identified the top problems, participants brainstormed over several ways to overcome these barriers using a structured activity called the 6 Hats Method. This is an ideation technique to examine different points of view on these problems and identify ways to overcome them.

Idea Cards

Inspired by the variety of one-line ideas that identify various ways to address these problems, participants generated idea cards that illustrate many of these concepts in greater detail.

Final Idea Lifecycle Showcase

The idea lifecycle illustrates the evolution of a concept from an idea card to high-fidelity designs, highlighting along the way, the important steps in the design process. By visualizing our design-thinking process, we shared everything we learned from our trial experience. This officially wrapped up our project.