Mick and I had a great discussion last week with
Ryan Howell, professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University. Ryan is a friend of mine who recently
got a lot of attention for his happiness research (and rightfully so), but recently he's been focusing on something a little different: the ultimate "gameday" experience.
Funnily enough, EchoUser was contacted in the past about improving the gameday experience of a well known Bay Area stadium, so we definitely had a lot of things to talk about with Ryan. First of which was: what the heck makes up a gameday experience?
As a total gameday noob (I never went to games as a kid, since I grew up mostly in the developing world), it was fascinating to hear what Mick and Ryan, two avid game fans, had to say about the component parts of a gameday experience. From a
service design perspective the gameday experience is chock-full of interesting things to focus on, with dozens of potential "events" to consider and track. Stay tuned as I cover our work with Ryan on improving the gameday experience of a Bay Area sports team, covering everything from an experience framework, to data gathering methodology choices, to
event-based testing.
