Spooky Nook Sports
Spooky Nook Sports recently transitioned to a new CRM system and identified various areas for improvement. Especially the UX design and the user journeys required an update to align with the overall desired website experience. Five Jars was hired to analyze the current state, identify areas for improvement and, eventually, integrate the required third-party functionalities.
A client with a large audience
Spooky Nook Sports operates the largest indoor sports complex across the United States and offers numerous different sports. Besides offering sports fields, Spooky Nook Sports offers a hotel, gym, and other recreational services such as an arcade, food court and meeting space. During their recent transition to the ACTIVENet CRM, Spooky Nook Sports recognized several areas for development regarding online scheduling and online calendar presentation. Identifying yet untapped efficiency-increasing opportunities, Spooky Nook Sports approached Five Jars to analyze their new CRM and integrate third-party functionalities to offer a seamless and intuitive UX to users while streamlining business processes.
More specifically, our team was hired to:
Calendar (Activity Finder), Program Specific Calendar (Activity Finder)
Analyzing the current situation
Spooky Nook Sports just recently completed the transition from their former CRM to the new ACTIVENet CRM. As it frequently happens, the transition led to a temporarily misaligned CRM which created various challenges for the team. First, we were required to anticipate the future final state of their CRM to build a solution which is future proof. Second, the UX design of current widgets was not aligned with neither the entire web experience nor with any sophisticated user journey analysis.
Therefore, Five Jars started its assignment by analyzing the current state of the CRM and outlined potential changes in the data structure. More precisely, our developers outlined the anticipated end state of the new CRM to anticipate the final structure of the data to be used in our functionalities. Moreover, our UI/UX experts began by tracking current user journeys to recognize the requirements of the new widgets in regard to their functionalities. By thoroughly analyzing the structure of Spooky Nook Sports’ website, we ensured that whatever we build throughout our collaboration will feel as Spooky Nook Sports, be recognized as Spooky Nook Sports and, most importantly, align with the internal business objectives and processes.
Drupal as underlying platform
Spooky Nook Sports is a great example for the application of the Drupal Open Source CMS. The two major arguments for Drupal as an underlying platform were that it is built upon an active development community and allows extensive third-party integrations by design.
Drupal has demonstrated to integrate in an efficient and effective way with ACTIVENet API and, therefore, offered significant cost advantages compared to other platforms available. As Five Jars aims to provide sustainable and cost-effective solutions, Drupal was proposed to Spooky Nook Sports and, eventually, chosen as the most viable solution. Additionally, our developers integrated Open Y to leverage various additional functionalities existing in Open Y.
- Open source: Open Y has an active community which drives improvements
- 304 YMCAs involved
Calendar widget
Spooky Nook Sports required a new calendar widget which allows its users to overview upcoming events and sports sessions. Our widget provides a comprehensive sorting functionality which allows users to display the events calendar based on various variables such as the start date of the event, location, activity, gender, or age. Moreover, our team included a search function which allows users to query the available events based on their own search terms.
Schedules Widget
Beyond the calendar widget, Spooky Nook Sports desired a new schedule widget which allows its users to receive a top-level overview of all available events based on a chosen filtering. After filtering the available events based on date, location, and activity, users can directly import the event into their personal calendars.
Activities can be filtered by:
- 2 locations
- 11 categories
- 17 sports
- 5 age ranges
Design of widgets
One of the main challenges was the additional widgets required to provide the same experience as the rest of the website. This meant that our solution was required to mimic the website design powered by HubSpot CMS which was inherent across the rest of the website. The challenge hereby was that user experience goes beyond simple design solutions. Our UI/UX experts created user journeys which do not only resemble a website powered by HubSpot CMS in appearance but also in the intuitive feeling when clicking through them.
Changing data structures
When we started with the project, the data was not yet as structured as required to foster a smooth real-time sync of events to the website. Shortly before the launch, the data was entirely structured by Spooky Nook Sports and our dev team was required to change the way the created widgets sync the event data. As our developers have anticipated such changes, they created solutions which are easy to update and adapt. Therefore, despite the last-minute change, Five Jars was able to finalize the solutions and go live with the final version of the applications.
Extensive analytics to drive future growth
Our developers created the widget with future growth plans of Spooky Nook Sports in mind. Therefore, comprehensive analytics capabilities were introduced. After the implementation, our client is able to drive marketing campaigns but also business planning by valuable insights gained from users and their behavior. Most importantly, our developers created an analytics interface which fosters quick comprehension of the most important metrics and extensive documentation of what each metric truly means and stands for.
2432
activities created
activities have been created in the first six months
>14,000
activities took place
activities took place in the first six months
Comprehensive documentation
Five Jars is convinced that our customers should be empowered to push updates by themselves onto the website. That is why we have provided Spooky Nook Sports with comprehensive documentation on how to use our tools and how to proceed when errors occur. While still being available for any questions they have, we do believe that considering cost-efficiencies for our clients, our documentation empowers both of us to focus on future improvements rather than current data handling alone.
Multi-phased launch
Spooky Nook Sports has a large audience and, therefore, we have decided to roll out our solutions in a phased approach. By using a multi-phase launch approach, we were able to introduce the new user experience in a controlled fashion by analyzing new data regarding user journeys and implementing necessary changes immediately. By doing so, we were able to use real-world data to improve the final solution and distilled the most effective UI/UX for Spooky Nook Sports.
Conclusion
We have launched a calendar and schedules widgets on the website that are constantly syncing with the ACTIVENet CRM and display up-to-date information about all available events. In order to achieve a seamless and intuitive solution, we analyzed the current state of the CRM transition and anticipated the near-future changes to the data structure. We ultimately went live in a phased way to ensure a smooth roll-out of our solution.
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