Inclusive fan experience at Johan Cruijff ArenA stadium in Amsterdam
Meet the team Sauron! A group of five people has come together to help create an exciting fan experience for visually impaired visitors at Jonah Cruijff ArenA in Amsterdam. We are researchers, entrepreneurs, programmers, designers and we also have one biomedical engineer (yeah, we also still don’t know what she does) that in the next five month will prototype and research the craziest ideas we can think of to improve the experience of visually impaired people at the stadium. Follow our project blog and we hope you will enjoy the ride as much as we do.
As our team works with the SCRUM technique in order to achieve our big goal, our first week started off with our first-ever sprint planning. Brainstorming, sharing ideas, asking questions — everything, that could have possibly helped us understand the path we were going to take, was discussed in one day. After spending some time with a lot of coffee and sticky notes, our sprint plan was ready. The first sprint we were about to start was aimed at finding out as much information as we could about the project’s stakeholders and creating the first prototype, which would meet the interests of both ArenA and VIP.
Already at the end of the first week, we yielded fruitful results of our research. Literature review, interviews and seeing through the other eyes techniques were our friends in this sprint to fully understand the end-user. We visited Johan Cruijff ArenA to understand how exactly the ArenA team itself sees the matter and what message do they want to translate to VIP. We got to have an exclusive tour at ArenA and even had a meeting at one of the skyboxes owned by Heineken (jealous yet?). All the luxuries aside, we got some valuable insight into how ArenA wants people to experience the tour and what is the ‘wow’ moment from their point of view. Now we could continue with our research journey further. Already at this stage, we started brainstorming ideas on what could help VIP experience ArenA tour. Would it be a haptic device? Would the prototype be wearable? Or do we concentrate solely on audio responses? Those are things we could not know yet and that is why we kept on exploring already existing technologies as well as reading existing interviews with VIP. This research gave us valuable insights such as the importance of accessible websites, easy space navigation, trained guides, and tactile representation for the VIP, especially when going to public places.
The second week of our sprint started off by visiting FabLab headquarters in Doorn (yeah, that was like reaaally far). It was one of the most interesting and insightful sessions we have been to ever! We discovered a lot of new technologies for VIP and, moreover, we were shown new ways of how to use already existing technology for sighted people to the advantage of VIP. We were allowed to take some of the toys with us to play around and think of ways to use them in our project or simply get inspired.
One of the essential things to this project is to understand the matter from the end-users’ perspective. Most of the research we had done up to this point was user-centered. One of the approaches we have taken to understand our user journey better was examining the existing customer journey map and tailoring it to the needs and obstacles that VIP find on their way to ArenA tour and throughout it. After analyzing our findings, we got the following result:
Another week, another ArenA tour. In the second week we visited ArenA again, but this time together with a group of visitors. We wanted to find out what were the motivations behind coming to ArenA tour. After asking people on the tour, we discovered that some people are mostly coming here as it is a part of Amsterdam experience for them, while others are football fans and want to see what is ‘behind the scenes’. We finished the tour by brainstorming about different prototypes we could create. Would it involve 3D sound? Should we use Beacon technology to navigate the visitors? Here the idea about our first prototype was born TADAAA DAAAAM…..
Preparing sprint review, creating an online questionnaire for VIP from other countries, creating a stakeholder map and thinking about our first prototype — all this in only two days, and try not to call us superheroes now!! Soo yeah, our first prototype sketch! 3D model with conductive nodes on it. When the user wants to explore a certain point of the model, they should touch the nodes of the stadium in that place. When they touch the node, it is activated and they will hear a 3D sound, which would be recorded from the different regions of the ArenA during the real game, which represents not only the anthems in the stadium but also the atmosphere of the stadium. On the other hand, as many fans might be jumping while singing the anthems of AJAX F.C. during the game, thanks to the Bass Shaker Tactile Transducers, we will strive to create an experience of ‘trembling’ stadium during the game.
We finished our sprint by successfully presenting our prototype and findings to stakeholders of the project and looking back at our three weeks of hard work that paid off! We gained a lot of new knowledge and experience, got first insights into the perspective of VIP, our end-user, and had a lot of fun learning. We are looking forward to the next sprint with more brainstorming, ideation, and prototyping. And if you want to find out more details about the project, do not hesitate to contact us via this e-mail: viktoriia.akhankova@hva.nl.
Yours sincerely,
team Sauron.
