an NHL bot design that improves fan engagement

Overview

As the NHL looked to increase fan base and improve fan engagement, I created an NHL bot to engage fans with informative and contextual conversation.

The initial outcome was a bot that satisfies a few use cases including personalized daily briefing, ticket purchasing, and etc.

Role & Duration

Product Designer

UX Strategy, User Research,

Workshop Moderation

Concepting, Interaction, Testing

Team of 3 designers, 1 developer

Aug - Nov 2017

The NHL Chatbot

A conversation UI aiming to improve NHL fan engagement.

The Problem

How might we improve NHL fan engagement?

It was reported that NHL fans are the most fact-driven and data-driven fans amongst all sports fans. How do we help foster this type of fans and enable them with important milestones and data?

Business Goal

Integrate SAP conversational UI technology

Stakeholder Workshop

A 4-day workshop was conducted with the NHL stakeholders from the departments of Digital Business, Products, Marketing and Social. There were also sports writers and the NHL fans.

My research encompassed

• Understanding NHL business strategy and mission for fan experience
• Identifying use cases for conversational experiences in the NHL ecosystem
• Generating sample conversations through design thinking exercises

Idea cards of possible use cases and sample bot convesations

Qualitative Research With Types of Fans

Fans

Interviews

Focus Groups

User research is essential. The needs and pain points of the multiple fan types needed to be laid out in detail. In order to achieve that, I gathered as much as I could from the different types of fans to understand their characteristics around the social network, game involvement, statistics preferences and etc. From here, I drew out their challenges and the possible opportunities.

Indifferent Fan

"I'll go only if invited, and I would not watch games by myself."

Casual Fan

"I go to games from time to time."

Knowledgeable Fan

"I like it when my team wins, but I lost interest in the games when my team loses play-offs."

Invested Fan

"I care a lot and I follow statistics almost everyday."

Insights

After conducting a variety of user interviews, focus groups and analyzing the gathered data, I was able to identify a few important key use cases that help achieve the NHL's business goals as well as the fan's needs of enablement.

Ideation

I started simulating conversation and creating low-fi concepts for primary use cases. After having a go-ahead from Stakeholders and developers on the mockups, we began to conduct usability tests with the low-fidelity mockups. Once we had confidence in the design, we began digitalizing designs.

The Designs

Provide on-demand information

The NHL bot provides contextual and on-demand information regarding player and team information, statistic education, player milestone, game highlights including articles and video content.

Gather Fan Preference Through a Quick Survey

To set a foundation for personalized editorial content, such as daily briefing, ticket purchasing, the NHL bot asks a few simple questions when fans sign up for the website and the app, regarding their level of experience, preferred teams and player, and ownership of accessories.

Personalized Daily Briefing

After user set up their personal profile and preferences for information, users can launch daily briefings, that is a daily dose of information about what happened, what’s happening, keys to the game via video and editorial content.

It helps educate and deconstruct the complexities of the game.

Discover the Right Game To Attend

The NHL bot also helps fans to explore possible games to attend as well as to deliver opportunities to buy tickets directly through NHL Ticket Exchange. This feature will generate revenue, as well as answers the question of 'who goes to our games'.

Quick Ticket Purchasing

The NHL bot allows fans to purchase tickets directly inside the NHL sites instead downloading Ticketmaster or go to the website. This feature will generate revenue, as well as answers the question of 'who goes to our games'.