USC is one of the most prestigious universities in California and the United States, as well as the home of one of the most competitive and historic NCAA teams: The Trojans. Trojans fans have carried the tradition of going to the campus every Saturday from 7:00 until game time, and have barbecues, drink beer and spend time with family and friends prior Trojan’s match, a tradition known as Tailgating. However, selecting your spot within the campus was no easy task, neither for fans nor USC staff, as the staff needed to draw boxes on illustrator individually , and updating all of them when customer requested changes.
USC partnered with Wizeline to figure out a technological solution to generate the customer experience for tailgaters when selecting the best spot for them to do tailgating, as well as the requirements they needed in terms of electricity. space.As the UX Lead of the project, I started my process conducting in-depth stakeholder interviews to uncover the expectations they had of the project, as well as all the valuable information of the customer needs they had discovered over the last 20 years, so I could take that input in consideration when proposing solutions.
After having a deep sense of the way Tailgating worked as a business model, the potential risks associated, and the goals USC as an organization wanted to accomplish (such as creating a honest, upbeat community of Tailgaters and provide a seamless experience for them), I decided to conduct collaborative sessions with my team and the stakeholders so everyone felt part of the solution. We decided to create Proto-Personas and Customer Journey Maps to identify potential pain points in the current experience.
After exploring the problem space through different approaches, we had a fair amount of potential opportunities to transform into delightful moments in the experience, so we started ideating in a collaborative way.The team decided to divide the experience into two perspectives: visitor experience
and admin experience.For the visitor experience, we generated solutions for tailgaters to select the games they wanted to attend during the season, their preferred spots, as well as a payment method (handled through PayPal).
For the admin experience, we defined the flow of creating a new event, establishing pricing for amenities, generating reports and permits for visitors, as well as defining spots for visitors, which required integrating the campus map, and making it interactive.
One of the most challenging features the team required to design consisted on adding enough interactivity to a map in order for admin users to select the spots they would assign to the visitors. To do so, the team needed to find a way of leveraging the existing map of the campus (which was an AutoCad file) and make it web-friendly so we could add an interactivity layer to it. From a user experience standpoint, we needed to take care of performance and creation, manipulation of the spots to give the necessary tools to admin users so they could perform greatly at their work and be able to assign spots to more than 300 people, individually.
We reduced the time Admin users would spend assigning spots and generating permits in 60%, as well as allowed customers to have a meaningful and engaging experience when selecting the games and preferred spots for the season.
