The relevance to sports teams of an always on, always connected fan has grown in recent years as Wi-Fi proliferation becomes a reality and the true potential of investing in a comprehensive mobile strategy has crystallised.
It’s become commonplace for teams to invest in a mobile app, however, along with a recognition of the Connected Stadium ideal, the mobile app; the official gateway for fans into their teams digital existence, is evolving rapidly.
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A series of Live Event App reviews done by Crowdsight, looks to understand the best practice and current industry standards of a new breed of team/event mobile app, that herald a shift from a purely informational approach towards embracing the transactional opportunities awarded by a stadium full of dedicated fans, eager to consume.
This review of the Barclays Center app is one installment in an app review series that looks to review individual innovative mobile app offerings by looking at how they tackle the challenge of complementing the stadium and fan experience, with a special emphasis on how they incorporate digital sponsorship.
Based on findings over the coming weeks, Crowdsight will be compiling the most comprehensive review of industry best practice in an e-book. Sign up to get a copy here as soon as it’s available.
Stadium Experience – Navigation, Map, and Eat
Barclays Center is a state-of-the-art indoor arena that opened in Brooklyn, New York in 2012. It is now home to the Brooklyn Nets basketball team (NBA), New York Islanders hockey team (NHL) (as of this year), and hosts a variety of other events such as concerts, conventions, tournaments, award shows, circuses, entertainment shows, and more. The arena boasts a unique and well-regarded design and offers amenities such as local cuisine for the concession vendors, as well as multiple bar and cocktail lounge areas.
For being such a hip, modern, and cutting-edge arena experience, one would expect the digital experience to match. However, utilizing the Barclays Center app at recent New Jersey Nets and NY Islanders games clearly demonstrated that while the app performs sufficiently, satisfying utilitarian functions, it falls short of delivering a compelling emotional reaction for fans.
This review will aim to understand why, focusing on the stadium, fan and sponsorship potential within the app.
Stadium Experience
Upon arrival at the arena, the app prompts first-time visitors to join the Barclays Center wi-fi network by providing some simple user information. For those who have attended a previous event at the arena, the wi-fi network is automatically detected and joined, providing a seamless and hassle-free experience. Users are then greeted with a basic “welcome screen” and a navigation menu in the top left corner of the app, enabling easy viewing of the various sections. The first impression given to users is a positive one, very clear and straightforward.
Beyond the welcome screen experience, the first app interaction at sporting events should be optimized for the moments before users even reach their seats. Recognizing that locating seats can be a harried process for fans, Barclays Center has provided a “Map” section within the app providing navigational cues to assist users in knowing where to go within the arena. However, the small font size and unclear marking of the arena entry doors/foyer makes it a bit challenging to use the app especially when in a moving crowd, and users may find it more efficient to simply look at the signage around the stadium once inside.
Aside from seat navigation, the “Map” section is valuable to assist users in understanding which of the many food vendors are nearest their seats. Users can click on the blue squares within the app to reveal the name of each concession and gain a quick understanding of what is in close proximity.
To build even more excitement and deepen the involvement level with fans, Barclays Center could add the ability to click on each vendor name (ie. Brooklyn Burger) to reveal their detailed menu, a few sentences about the backstory of that vendor, and provide a link to directly to order concessions. This addition would make the app more fluid and enhance the fan experience, without which the functionality feels very one-dimensional.
Aside from providing maps of the inside of the facility itself, Barclays Center has recognized that many of their attendees do not live in the borough and coming to Brooklyn is an attraction and outing. The app wisely includes “Around Brooklyn” content, providing restaurant and bar recommendations in the neighborhood areas nearby, including Yelp ratings and reviews for those establishments. This valuable information can assist fans with logistical decisions and planning for their before/after game festivities. It’s impressive Barclays has considered the full timeline of the user journey, which starts and ends outside the arena, and the app includes utilitarian information to align with this insight.
To make the app even more compelling and exciting for fans within the arena, the app could better highlight quick descriptions of each food vendor, include photos of the food, customer reviews, and descriptions of the various lounges/bar areas. Especially with so many unique local food offerings right within the Barclays Center (ie. Blue Marble ice cream, L&B Spumoni Gardens, etc), additional storytelling to elicit emotion and excitement about these restaurants. Sharing their Brooklyn roots/backstory and each vendor’s specialty could be augmented within the app. Barclays Center has so many impressive amenities right within the facility, and these could be better brought to life.
Ordering food via stadium apps has at this stage become an expected offering within an app, and is now fairly mainstream. The Barclays Center app currently provides this functionality, but surprisingly this is only available for select seating sections (currently only the Upper Pavilion). Although the capability for ordering exists, it is fraught with some user experience challenges. Users cannot currently browse menus quickly, without first submitting their section, row, and seat information. This limited browsability can be frustrating to users, as there is no ability to conduct a quick scan of food options before making decisions or requiring excessive clicks.
Overall, the bones and foundation of the Barclays Center app exist, but are currently very siloed into functional sections where “Eat” is not linked up with “Maps”. The Barclays Center app would be well-served to increase the fluidity of the overall experience and enable users to navigate from one area of the app to another more easily (ie. scanning concession names on the maps to viewing menus to ordering food).
Fan Experience
Enhanced audio/visual content is the perfect way to engage fans and build emotional connections. The “Watch” section of the Barclays Center app currently promotes the ability to watch live footage or instant replays during a game which sounds thrilling. However, when interacting with this section at recent Nets and Islanders games, live footage was not available and viewing replays was difficult. A confusing error message of “No channels found” was frequently prominently displayed. This unclear wording can easily lead to user abandonment. This messaging could be tweaked to give users a better idea of when they can expect to see footage, especially because once success was had viewing instant replay footage, the instant replay feature was quite impressive with strong quality of the video feed and close-up action views. This video offering could be a true gem of the Barclays Center app if some of the usability kinks are ironed out.
To build even more emotional excitement and increased fan interaction, the “watch” section could also be made robust by adding other “behind the scenes” type video footage, even if it wasn’t live. For instance, they could include a time-lapse video of the crew converting Barclays Center from an ice hockey arena to basketball arena (putting the floor on top of the ice) which would be fascinating. Interviews with players or coaches about that evening’s match-up would also be interesting to watch. There is opportunity to include much more unique video content within the app and across social media channels, leading the app to evolve from being purely functional resource into becoming a more comprehensive offering.
Similarly, the intention behind the “Interact” section of the app is enthralling. Users worldwide adore the notion of having individual photos and text messages displayed prominently on the scoreboard at sporting events they attend. What an exciting proposition!
Unfortunately, this interaction idea proved challenging upon execution within the Barclays Center app. User-submitted content was not readily apparent on the scoreboard or repeatedly announced on the public address system during Nets or Islanders games. It seems this feature may lack awareness with minimal extra muscle currently being given to promote the feature as part of the in-arena experience.
Additionally, when users attempt to submit SMS content, it is not a hassle-free experience. Instead, users frequently encounter error messages. For instance, if a user sends in a message immediately after the team scores a hockey goal saying “Woo! Woo! Gooooaaaallll”, they immediately are given feedback to check their spelling. If the jumbotron zooms in on a well-known personality who is in attendance at the game and users attempt to submit a comment about the celebrity (“I want to sit next to Michael J. Fox”), they receive an error back that the text is not recognized by the system.
At sporting events in particular, it is common and fun to use nonsensical words and proper nouns (player names/nicknames) to express emotion, cheer for a particular team, and infuse a bit of humor. By having such tight restrictions on the type of content considered to broadcast more widely, it seems to diminish the spontaneity and emotion involved in this “Interact” feature of the Barclays Center app.
Overall, the in-arena fan experience is lively and upbeat at Barclays Center. There are constant promotions and performances including t-shirt throws, cheers, music, dance team performances, stunts, video montages, basketball shoot competitions, and so forth, but this excitement does not translate to the fan experience within the app.
Digital Sponsorship Initiatives
Very few, if any, digital sponsorship components are included within the Barclays Center app, even though the in-person stadium experience is full of sponsorship integration.
For example, at a recent Islanders game, a Zappos booth gave away free “thunder sticks” and sunglasses, and at the Nets game, MetroPCS handed out free towels. A simple yet effective addition to the app could be a section called “Giveaways” where these sponsor offerings are listed so users can quickly discover what freebies are currently offered at each event and where in the stadium they can be found. Fans could then make it a point to seek out those destinations instead of simply stumbling upon them. This would also give sponsors more of a platform to share their brand story/messaging and better connect with fans.
The current Barclays Center app also lacks any real-time conversation elements with sponsors. Within the Nets iPhone app (different than the Barclays Center app), the Nets Twitter feed is incorporated. Porting over this content and including this type of feed within the Barclays Center app as well could be an easy way to provide more of a real-time experience and platform for sponsors to dialogue with fans. The Barclays app could also aggregate user content containing specific hashtags in addition to promoting content they as an organization create.
Conclusion
Any of the apps that make our Team and Event App Review Series are innovators – especially the Barclays Center app, originally released by Willow Tree Apps way back (in Connected Stadium terms anyway) in 2012. It’s key though to examine existing app offerings critically so that we can identify its real strengths, while also recognising the potential for improvement.
With this in mind, the digital experience offered within the app is undeniably impressive but seemed to fall just short in translating and enhancing to great effect, the physical in-person arena experience. While many of the features remain compelling, even ground-breaking, the opportunity to enable the functionality across all areas of the stadium remains unfulfilled.
This limitation in the Barclays Center app is most pronounced when we examine digital sponsorship, with little branding emphasis outside of the stadium naming rights. Some may find this refreshing, however, one of the primary benefits of integrating digital sponsorship components is the integral emphasis this brings on engaging and entertaining fans – as Sponsors want their brands to be seen as adding to the excitement and emotion.
In terms of the overall excitement, as fans we’re there for the game and because of this, the integration of live video replay directly in-app is fantastically valuable. The reality that you can watch highlights, means you can actually enjoy yourself more in-stadium without worrying about missing the action. In this regard, the Barclays Center app did deliver with strong video replay once the channel was identified.
One key challenge as mentioned, is the availability of certain team news or functionality only in the separate official team apps. Having a dedicated venue app (i.e. Barclays Center app) and a separate team app (i.e. New Jersey Nets) – limits the immersiveness of game day somewhat. This is a significant challenge for the team and event apps ecosystem, to what degree they can coincide gracefully alongside a dedicated venue app. Stay tuned for more of this later in the series.
John Fennessy is the founder of Crowdsight, an in-app rewards platform that captures fan images and moments in exchange for Sponsored Rewards. Using real-time social analytics to measure interactions, Crowdsight identifies the most valuable fan generated content and creates opportunities for Sponsors to react directly to those fans. To find out more about Crowdsight and how it can integrate into your team or event app, contact john.fennessy@crowdsight.co or follow @crowdsight_