Encouraging sharing and interaction in the O2 arena
UX Design | O2 arena | Concept project | 2 week sprint General Assembly, London
From March to June 2018, I was a student on the User Experience (UX) Design Immersive Course at General Assembly (GA), London. This was the third of four projects that we undertook and the first of two projects that were team-based. It was a concept project for the O2 arena, aiming to increase social activity related to its live music events through a custom mobile application.
Despite this being a concept project, we worked intensively throughout; at times it was hard, particularly because none of the team were hugely keen live music or social media enthusiasts and we went through some fairly dramatic conceptual pivots. But overall, the project was a worthwhile experience— I really enjoyed working with Ryan and Arno who were great fun.
As with the other GA UX design projects, we followed the process of Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver, visually represented by the Double Diamond:
Discover
The brief
The O2 Arena is a multi purpose indoor arena located in the centre of The O2 entertainment complex on the Greenwich Peninsula in South East London. The O2 Arena has the second highest seating capacity of any indoor venue in the UK, behind the Manchester Arena, but took the crown of the world’s busiest music arena from New York City’s Madison Square Garden in 2008.
The O2 arena is looking to increase social activity related to its live music events through a custom mobile application. They want to offer visitors a platform to share experiences in a unique and compelling way.
They would like the following features:
- The ability to share and interact with other users
- An interactive element to feel engaged in the experience in a personalised way
- Personalised content relevant to the user’s tastes and preferences
Site visit
We visited the O2 arena itself during a gig and found the following:
- The queuing system is generally efficient.
- While people are waiting (queues, in between acts), they use their phones on a frequent basis.
- The arena itself is quite photogenic with various signs/images/monuments that people would take photos in front of.
- Most people would take photos leading up to the main act, then during the main act itself they would generally put their phones away and focus on the music.
- This particular gig was mainly targeted at a younger crowd — accompanying parents looked quite bored;
- Despite full 4G signal, the upload times for videos on sharing apps was very slow.
The existing O2 arena app
The current O2 arena app has the following features:
- Arena map
- Travel information
- ‘What’s on’ guide
- Ticket buying
- View ticket
- Take a selfie
- Photo wall
- Voting
The latter 3 features overlap with our brief so we looked into them more closely. Essentially in the current app, a user is able to upload an unlimited number of photos at any time (before, during, after, in between gigs) onto the photo wall. The photos were therefore generally of poor quality and irrelevant to the actual gigs. There was no interactivity on the photo wall — users were unable to show approval (e.g. ‘likes’ or ‘thumbs up’) or comment on photos. Also the ‘voting’ system functioned only during gigs and we were unable to access this.
Competitor apps
We looked at a range of competitor apps, from direct to indirect competitors. Some were ‘sharing’ platforms for general experiences, others were more ‘music focused’. We examined the level of interaction that users had with other users’ posts and drew up the following matrix:
‘Bands in town’ is currently the only competitor we identified that was both music-focused and had high interactivity. We hoped to move the O2 arena app into the same area.
User survey
We sent out surveys to our personal contacts that go to live music events and received a total of 55 responses.
Our average survey-responder was male, aged 26–35, attends gigs a couple of times a year, with 2–4 other people, shares photos and does not use venue apps. As in the charts below, the majority of our survey-responders shared their experiences on social media only rarely or at some music events, mostly after the event itself.
User interviews
We interviewed 13 of our survey-responders and constructed an affinity map — a technique which allows the identification of patterns between concepts and quotes gathered during the interviews; often turns into a post-it frenzy.
Here are our those key patterns:
Why do people go to live music events?
- People go to concerts to ‘feel alive’, benefit from a ‘natural high’, enjoy the thrill and get ‘lost in the moment’
- They also value building and recording special and unique memories
- And they value feeling closer to their friends and finding common ground with new people
What do they feel before live music events?
- They’re excited
- Possibly tipsy, having been drinking with friends
- But, waiting is the biggest frustration for them — queueing to get in, waiting between acts, and not knowing how long it will take
How do they feel about sharing their experiences?
- They feel that putting an interesting photo up on social media is a ‘cool’ thing to do, but they don’t want to seem like they’re showing off
Define
Personas
Representative personas can be another useful way of focussing and summarising the findings from surveys and interviews.
Our first persona, Jaz, was built using our survey results and based on some of our user interviewees:
We also considered a second persona, Melo, who represented a younger, social-media-savvy user and reflected some of our younger user interviewees.
For the rest of our define phase, we decided to focus on our first persona, Jaz, because he better represented our ‘average’ survey-responder and interviewee.
Experience and empathy maps
I find that experience maps are a particularly useful tool in the UX design process. They give more context to the issue at hand, identify pain-points of the user journey and can illustrate a user’s processes, needs, and feelings throughout their experience with a product or service.
We constructed this experience map based on our user interview results:
The clear dips took place in waiting times and also post-event.
We also constructed an empathy map — another related UX tool, helpful in ‘putting yourself in the shoes’ of the user — of what Jaz would experience before, during and after the gig.
Develop
How might we…
‘How might we’ questions reframe a problem into a question and an opportunity for ideation.
We constructed the following ‘How might we’ question for our develop phase:
How might we make waiting times an opportunity to build fun memories?
We felt that this addressed various aspects of our discover and define phase — e.g. the frustration of waiting, the importance of building positive memories for our users. Also, as per our survey, our users tend mainly to share on social media after the event— we wanted to try to reverse this and encourage them to share before the main act.
Design studio
We ran a design studio using the above ‘How might we’ question. Our key directions included using incentives to encourage our users to ‘share’ more e.g. competition or rewards (especially as our main persona, Jaz, is not a serial-sharer). The brief required us to build an app that encouraged sharing and interacting with other users and the importance of social interaction, both with a user’s own friends/contacts and with new people, emerged as a key trend in our user interviews. We therefore wanted to encourage real-life social interaction using the app.
Our first idea
Our first idea was uploading and sharing photos with other people who attended the same concert — you could award ‘tokens’ to photos uploaded by others and they could award ‘tokens’ to your photos. Those tokens could then be redeemed for rewards e.g. discounts, free drinks, merchandise.
But there were various problems:
- During paper prototype testing, users had difficulty differentiating between tokens that they’d received and tokens they were given.
- We struggled to find a way to incentivise people to award tokens to other people.
- Most importantly, the process of taking and uploading photos and giving out tokens was a fairly solo activity — it didn’t achieve our goal of encouraging real-life social activity.
The pivot — time for a new idea
We ran a second design studio and our new idea is still based on a reward-based incentive but has a greater emphasis on social interaction.
The idea is that each ticket-holder can upload a photo (and only 1 photo) onto a photo wall specific to their arena seating area for the particular gig they are attending. The area that proportionally uploads the most photos, will get to see their photos shown on the arena big screen in the waiting time between the supporting and main act.
Deliver
How would this app improve the user experience? We constructed a storyboard and new experience map to demonstrate the intended benefits of the app. These help to provide an end goal and continued focus for the rest of the deliver phase.
Storyboard
Experience map (take 2)
Our app gives the user something to do and get excited about during waiting times and encourages them to chat to people in his area. If the user and his area win the prize and see themselves on the big screen, they will also have a unique experience that they can tell others for years to come.
Hypothesis testing
We wanted to find out whether the concept of ‘being on the big screen’ would actually be appealing for our users.
Our hypothesis: People would share their photos on the big screen if they were given the opportunity and this would improve their experience of going to the O2 arena
Assumptions:
- People would consider having their photo on the big screen as unusual/unique
- People would appreciate / enjoy seeing their photo on the big screen
Test:
- User interviews — we interviewed 10 users about their thoughts on the above assumptions
Outcome:
We would therefore conclude that most people would find it to be a unique experience and would value and enjoy it.
User flow and site map
This is the user flow, the steps that a user takes, for the sign-up process and uploading a photo:
And the user flow for seeing photos from another area:
For apps, this and other user flows can be visually represented in the site map:
Prototyping and testing
And so we began creating the prototypes — from paper to digital and then to the next digital iteration. The purpose of this is to make a basic version of the app so that we could user feedback and make improvements as quickly as possible. Compared to the alternative of making a “perfect” digital version of the app or even coding it straight away, the UX design process of iterating over multiple basic prototypes means it’s much quicker and easier to correct mistakes and adapt to strategic changes, ultimately resulting in a better product or service, faster.
The paper prototype
Problems with the paper prototype
On the home screen, users did not understand what the word ‘group’ meant — they thought it signified the group of friends they were attending the gig with. We thus decided to rename ‘group’ as ‘area’. During testing, the group name ‘613–634’ was also problematic — users thought it was a reference number, rather than a range of seat numbers. The name was changed to a single number that reflected existing blocks in the arena.
On this arena screen, users did not understand the rectangle on the bottom right with the numbers ‘4, 1, 0’ in it. It was meant to signify the arena floor level, but we decided that it was confusing and unnecessary so removed it.
On this area X pics screen, our users voiced concern about the precise labelling of photos with row and seat number and the potential for that to be abused by unsavoury characters — some described it as ‘creepy’. We therefore removed this precise labelling of photos.
The first digital prototype
Problems with the first digital prototype
The on-boarding process above was described by users as ‘wordy’ and ‘confusing’ — users did not know what would be going up on the big screen. We simplified this for the next iteration. They also did not understand why there was a ‘next’ button and also a close ‘x’ in the top-right corner — we removed the ‘x’ and replaced it with ‘skip’.
On the area X screen, users did not understand the concept of ‘rank’ and many hardly noticed it. The layout of the page was changed in the next iteration to make it more obvious.
On the area X pics screen, several users expressed a preference for swiping rather than clicking to browse through photos in a particular area.
The second digital prototype
Our second digital prototype walk-through
Next Steps
The results of our second digital prototype usability tests:
- There were still issues with the on-boarding process, in particular with the ‘skip’ button. We would also have to make sure the app was easy to access to people who had used it before, either for people who were accessing the app multiple times during the same gig, or for people who were going to several gigs at the O2 arena.
- Several users said they wanted to know ‘where’ they were within the app e.g. highlighted buttons in the navigation bar.
- Some users suggested a ‘You are here’ pop-up on the arena page so they had a better handle on where they were sitting in relation to other areas.
Further features we would consider adding:
- To increase interaction between users, as per the brief, we would consider adding a ‘comment’ function on photos.
- If possible, it would also be useful adding in a ‘troll’ monitor on both the photos being submitted and on comments, though this would likely be resource intensive.
We would also like to integrate the app:
- With the current O2 app — perhaps as a replacement of the current ‘photo wall’.
- With the big screen (this is a must!).
- And with existing social media — being able to share your photo or a photo of the big screen on instagram, for example.
What I learned
- None of the team shared many characteristics with our target users so the project was an exercise in empathising with others — thinking hard about what others go through (particularly by using experience maps and empathy maps) was an important step in this project.
- If problems with an idea are insurmountable, adapt quickly — we conducted a second design studio a day after the first and this led to a quick improvement without impacting on the whole sprint too greatly.
- Paper prototypes are really effective tools — because they look quite ‘rough and ready’ to users, they are more likely to give their honest opinion about them.
