Kom Curl Med Oss
Better curling experience for corporate customers
Jar Isforum offers curling as an offering for customers, but the current curling experience has many problems:
Booking experience: The lack of structured information in their current website and the ineffective negotiation process caused the loss of potential customers in the early stage of booking.
Offline experience: The lack of service gestures and unpleasant experience on ice etc.
Overview
Client
Jar Isforum
Team
1 User Researcher
1 Visual & service designer (me)
1 Service designer
My role
User Research
Prototype
Storytelling
Duration
16 weeks
Tool
Balsamiq
Sketch
Wix
Kom Curl Med Oss is our holistic solution: Redesigning the curling experience to attract new customers and retain old ones for the before, during, and after phrase of the entire experience.
How could new customers be attracted and old ones retained as extended network?
OPPORTUNITY
The solution
Booking experience: Redesigning the website
Jarisforum.no is the website being currently used by Jar Isforum to communicate all it’s information. While it is a comprehensive site, the information is not structured or graphically set which leads to cluttering and confusion.
Here, the fully functional website was quickly put together to provide an alternative to Jar Isforum while they re-design their website. This was also designed to show the flow of information, keeping it simple, clean and straightforward.
Customizable experience
The booking process was designed to provide an automated alternative to the manual process that currently takes place when a customer wants to book ice-time.
As per their offerings, a basic package was designed to show the clients what they’ll be receiving with their events. This is accompanied with additional services that customers could opt for if they wanted to add to their curling experience, for example adding a ceremony at the end of the competition or offering beverages for customers.
FINAL SOLUTION
Better offline experience
For the offline experience, customers had unclear communication with the instructors and confusion during the experience, some new touchpoints are suggested to make the experience better and cause potential referrals.
“I’ve curled at Jar Isforum before, getting armbands this time was very positive and gave us team spirits”
A anonymous customer
“The welcome screen was a nice welcoming. I know many of us took pictures of it. It was great that it clearly informed where we were going”
Anna Risnes Oslo Universitetssykehus
Customer feedback
Process
Curling at Jar Isforum
BACKGROUND
Jar Isforum is a great multi-use space located in Oslo, with premises for larger parties, social areas with kiosk for sales, a large (and fast-growing) member base, and sporting facilities like curling, which are well designed for team building and parties.
In the last and a half years, Jar has had over 26 unique business customers in curling. However, only about 13.5% of curling business customers return to Jar.
There is a great opportunity to get business customers to return for more curling by enhancing the curling experience through tailored offers, follow-ups, and attractive business packages.
What is the current curling experience?
RESEARCH
We went through many research workshops with our stakeholders, and some interviews and we did a customer observation with Norconsult to understand how they experience curling at Jar Isforum: how to make a reservation? how the curling is operated at Jar Isforum?
Findings
RESEARCH
Unstructured
information
No standard process
Unclear communication
No follow-ups
During our project, due to the limited amount of time, we didn’t find exactly why customers didn’t return. After we had a feedback session with Mr. Andreas from Live|Work who provided us with some key points to consider from a brief point of view.
“Rather than trying for the outcome of getting customers to return which is a very hard task, you could instead look into ways for customers to refer to Jar Curling after their visit”
Thus, combining our findings, we reframed our brief:
How could new customers be attracted and old ones retained as extended network?
Final brief
Design criteria
IDEATION
Brainstorming & idea testing
FINAL DESIGN
01 Sister website
A dedicated mini website for commercial events.
02 Automate the booking process
A booking process with an manual alternate of Negotiation Document
03 Welcome letter
The welcome email will include an invitation letter which has the agenda for curling event, booking confirmation letter and safety instruction. It can be edited in the template folder.
04 Welcome screen
Currently, when customers arrive at Jar Isforum, there is a lack of greeting moments to welcome customers, they don’t know who to talk to, or where they should go, it ruins their first impression.
Having a personalized welcome screen for business customers is a way to greet them more professionally and lead them to the experience.
05 Instruction presentation
This touchpoint is to make these instructions more visible and coherent for the customers. It takes the introduction away from using roll-up poster that is hard to read from distance and instead using a presentation on the smartboard in the room. This will give the instructor the ability to go full screen into important aspects of the game and it have the effect of making customers sit down at the tables placed around the smartboard so they can relax a bit before they start to curl.
06 Armband
Curling is a team sport and with business customers coming in larger groups they need to be split into smaller teams, usually four players on each. Team armbands will give a new and thrilling dimension to the act of sorting out the curling teams. It makes it easier to organize the different teams on the ice and it gives the participants a stronger sense of team spirit.
At the same time, a random selection would make the team-building experience more fun and surprising.
07 Meme postcard
A meme postcard is proposed as a new touchpoint in the after session, while, as a way to create a fun image for Jar Isforum, making the experience more memorable and create the possibility for referring new customers.
DELIVER
Service blueprint & implementation plan
REFLECTION
What did we learn?
Working and designing closely with clients
This project with Jar Isforum has been an interesting and very open possibility to look into a service delivering sporting experiences. We have seen huge potential in the top modern facilities, and they have clearly been in need of applying service and design thinking into who they are, what they do, and how they approach their users. We have had the opportunity to work with actors within the service who has helped us in any way thinkable.
Management at Jar has been extremely responsive in their communication with us, they have facilitated possibilities to work around customers and put us in contact with anyone we have needed to talk to. This leniency has been very comfortable to work with.
Due to limited amount of time we had, we didn't manage to get insights from customers that why they didn't return, but we managed to reframe the goal and figure out what we can do instead, and this is very inspiring when we have struggled with the current goal but shifting mindset and adjust our plan.
Reframing the goal
Thank you for reading :)