Owning the Memory: A Look at Fans & How They Experience Merchandise
Understanding the fan experience at the Women’s NCAA Final Four event in order to distil fan persona’s to inform merchandising decisions within the NCAA Championships business division.
Project Partners: Client: NCAA
Role: Design Researcher, Proposal Designer
Developed as part of a learning opportunity within our Collaborative Action Research in Design course.
Research Process
This project allowed us direct access to fans of the NCAA championship events for DII Swimming and DI Women’s Basketball in order to understand their experiences, needs and desires focused around merchandise. For both of the sporting events, I was able to conduct the majority of the interviews that gave us the data that allowed us to compile the personas and the experience maps that served as a frame to explain our findings to the NCAA.
Content and Frameworks
During the analysis and synthesis portion of the project, I helped establish the Persona Framework in the Swimming section that got used later in the Basketball section. I was also responsible for the design of the research document that guided our presentation to the NCAA.
This project was completed alongside the School of Physical Education and Tourism Management (PETM), proving that their quantitative data collected from the events could be supported and further understood with qualitative findings in order to paint a bigger, more comprehensive picture.
