Project 3   Nationals Park

The Challenge

    Nationals Park, located in Navy Yard, opened in March 2008 as the first LEED-certified green major professional sports stadium in the united states, and holds 41,000 attendees. As the 2018 MLB All-Star Game host, the Nationals and the parks owners (Events DC) are looking to ensure fan experience is top notch, in celebrating 10 years of open doors. They want to leverage their current mobile app to give game attendees tools to better discover everything the new stadium has to offer and to simplify the processes for purchasing concessions and merchandise, donating to their foundation, and engaging with the game from their seats.

The Users

    We posted surveys on Reddit threads for the Washington Nationals fans and from those responses we were able to conduct more in depth interviews with some of those fans that attend the games at Nationals Park regularly.  We synthesized all that data into the following persona.

Our Approach

    We started our approach by doing extensive market analysis with parks and stadiums that have companion apps and also for apps that provide similar services to the ones that Nationals Park was asking for.  From the user interviews we were also able to filter out common pain points that fans were experiencing.  More on this later.

    We then compiled a list of features that we saw that users wanted from our app, with an emphasis on the ones that we found that were missing from the apps we researched.  We then did various cardsorting exercises to figure out which were more important for our users.

    We then focused our attention on incorporating a gamification aspect to our app to make it not just useful but also enjoyable.  We researched in depth what kind of incentives different parks were doing and also how these opportunities were being presented.  After extensive research on rewards programs and their benefits to the top companies in the US, we settled on a rewards program as what we wanted to incorporate into our app.

Opportunities

    From all the user interviews and contextual research analysis we found a few areas of improvement that National Park could benefit from. 

Solution

    Increase brand loyalty through an app that eliminates pain points for users and enrolls them in a fan loyalty program.  The elegance of this solution lies in its simplicity.  The users get convenience and validation through rewards from the app, and the Park gets more engagement and loyalty from the fans which results in higher profits.