With the rise of XR technologies, large corporations are looking for ways to use these technologies to promote their brands and address problems or pain points for their users. For this project, our team explored how XR technology can help improve experiences for MLB fans as a project for the Professional Certificate in UX & Emerging Interaction Design course.
I worked with 3 other designers and our goal in this project was to improve the MLB ticketing experience for MLB fans to guarantee a perfect game day for them and their families.
My role for the project during the ideation phase involved ideation and concept generation from user insights, secondary research, and user journey mapping. During the development phase, I built and tested the VR prototype in Unity and iterated the design based on user feedback.
4 weeks
How might we leverage emerging technologies such as VR to improve the MLB experience?
During the problem discovery phase, we found that one pain point that stood out is regarding weather. It's impossible to predict what the weather would be like during the game day at the seat you’re sitting at. However, an extremely hot and sunny day could cause discomfort and sunburns, while rainy days could leave MLB fans drenched and ruin the experience.
We conducted interviews and secondary research on the current experience of going to an MLB game. Once we understood the problem as well as the current experience of buying a ticket, we began ideating.
We focused on designing around the unique advantages of VR. One of these advantages was immersion.
Therefore, we ideated around the question of how can the user benefit from the immersion of VR in the context of buying a ticket?
The dashboard highlights important metrics that can be utilized to quickly identify key inactive product listings. The dashboard also provides the users with monitoring tools to see changes that occur, allowing users to quickly spot anomalies in product listing behaviors. Statistics for the sub-team within the Listing Health team are also clearly compartmentalized to allow managers to quickly assess the performance of each sub-team as well.
The was dashboard planned to be implemented in the Listing Health Tool in the following sprint.
We wanted to understand the user’s problems and design a solution that can fit their needs. We found the core demographics of MLB fans and selected our users based on those demographics.
I started the design process for the dashboard by diving into the Listing Health Tool and exploring it thoroughly as well as reaching out directly to stakeholders and users of the tool. After initial conversations with the Listing Health team, I found that there were multiple users that interacts with the platform.
I realized that I needed to learn more about not only how the tool is being used, but also how the users are making decisions through the tool as well. I conducted several virtual contextual interviews with the users group to understand their workflow and decision making.
I also set up a quick card-sorting activity with different types of data as the cards and let the users categorized the types into different “buckets” to understand the relationship between each type.
Here's what we found from the interviews:
Diving into the game experiences, we also asked the users specifically to describe their pain points in the experience.
“The game is the more social environment to me, especially if I am there with Jennifer my wife…the seats, the view… certainly weather is really important at a game as opposed to home.”
Many users indicated the same about the weather experience being a core part of their experience. We also found that ticket buyers usually buy tickets for their whole family and feel responsible for the experience of that day and we incorporated this element into our persona, Pauline.
Pauline, an archivist at work, is the best planner in her family. She loves her outdoor leisure and takes pride in sorting out all the details for family outings. She loves her outdoor leisure and takes pride in sorting out all the details for family outings.
At the last game, it was a hot and sunny day. The seats she bought were unfortunately in direct sun and her niece and nephew got bad sunburns.
Determined to overcome heat issues that diminish the fun of being outside at the stadium, She jumps online tries to find the best tickets for the upcoming game.
To address the pain point of the weather, we thought that we can let the user see the view from their seat from within a virtual environment. This solution already exists for some stadiums, where the user can view the exact point of view in the stadium but to add the element of weather, we wanted to integrate the position of the sun into this simulation as well. The shape of the stadium influences shadows and rain cover for the fan sitting in the stadium which can impact their experience during the game.
The method that a typical baseball fan buys a ticket is through the MLB website. We constructed a task flow diagram to determine where we can integrate our experience. We thought that we can integrate this experience when the user is choosing the seat from the map.
The project was centered around trying to create an experience using VR. However, we realize that forcing VR into the solution might not be the best approach, however to make the best of the project, we focused on designing around the unique advantages of VR. One of these advantages was immersion.
Therefore, we ideated around the question of how can the user benefit from the immersion of VR in the context of buying a ticket?
Here's the features we decided to include:
We first tested the prototype within our team and found that parts of the UI were obstructing the user's view. This was because the UI was mocked up on a two-dimensional screen in Figma. This was an important lesson for our team, which made us realized the capabilities and things to watch out for when designing for VR. Our decision was then to place the main components near the bottom of the user's field of view to minimize the visual clutter.
One of the main goal for our prototype was allowing the user to see the shade position within the stadium. However, after further user testing with the target audience, we found that it was difficult for the user to see if the shadow was hitting them directly. This was addressed by adding an element to the UI which shows how intensely the sun is hitting the user's seats.
Problems with the first iteration:
Solution from user testing
One pain point we found through user research was that weather was pivotal to the outdoor stadium experience. Our design was a VR experience that simulates the game-day weather, specifically sun exposure throughout the duration of the game. Our target users' main goal is to plan out the game day and provide the best experience for their families with the tickets they purchase. The Stadium Weather Simulator helps the user identify, through the first-person view in VR, where the sun and shadows will be throughout the game time.
With the capabilities of VR technology, there are many opportunities for functionalities. One possible idea is adding informative overlays for navigation within the stadium. This could include evacuation routes, restroom locations, stadium accessibility features such as elevators and ramps, and many more. Information that helps users navigate their environment within the stadium is a perfect fit for VR since VR can help users become more familiar with the stadium's physical environment before even attending the venue.
