The UX Diaries: How are you experiencing the Olympics?
Enjoying the Olympic Winter Games so far? And by “enjoying,” we mean watching, listening to, reading, tweeting, sharing and liking across several platforms and in different environments?
This is the very question we’re seeking to answer with a diary study involving a small group of Canadians. The participants will be asked to log their thoughts and activities around how they take in the Olympic Winter Games.
We want to gain an understanding and long-term view of people’s behaviours, attitudes and motivations.
How do people watching PyeongChang 2018 move across platforms and channels? Where do they find the event schedules? How does the time zone affect their experience? How do they share the big moments?
We’re conducting this study because we know that the way you experience the events happening in Pyeongchang today is likely different from the way you took in the Torino Winter Games just over a decade ago.
Consider, for example, that in 2006 the iPhone and iPad hadn’t yet been released. Twitter was still a gleam in someone’s eye — it was released about one month after the end of the Torino Olympics, while Facebook had been operating for just two years. Neither Snapchat nor Instagram were available during the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver, let alone for the Torino games!
Where once we sat around a television set or gathered at a local bar, we now bond over thrilling wins and heartbreaking defeats on social media. Live streaming makes the Olympics available in a whole new way, allowing people to watch the events anytime and anywhere on several different channels.
With all these changes, we want to understand you and your needs and expectations about your Olympic experience. For example, we may learn about new ways people want to access Olympic scheduling information, or help us better understand how we can use social media to enhance the experience.
The goal is to continue refining our experiences — improving as we go, hand-in-hand with you.
