Preliminary Analysis

Ticket Who?

Ticketmaster is the #1 ticket seller in eCommerce. It operates in 32 countries and has over 100 million platform visitors each month, with 66 million coming from the mobile app.

Ticketmaster's largest source of revenue is service charge paid by consumers who purchase / resell tickets on the platform, which starts on the Discover tab (landing page) on the mobile app.

Study Overview

Room for Improvement

Purpose

Identify areas of improvement for Ticketmaster’s Discover page.

Participants

Seattle residents who show interest in exploring / purchasing tickets to venues using the Ticketmaster mobile app. Participants are divided into two groups according to prior experience with the app.

Research Questions

How might we improve the user flow of discovery tasks?
How might UI encourage users to take action?
How might we improve the discoverability of search features?

Study Design

Heuristic Evaluation to determine to discover usability issues and validate initial hypotheses.
Four tasks, on main features such as search and explore.
Pre- & Post- task interviews for qualitative data and deeper insight.

Study Findings

Issues at Hand

TL;DR

We used the Nielson Severity Rating to measure the severity of the usability issue based on frequency, impact and persistence.

Participants had considerable difficulty with the search functionalities. (Rating 3 - major usability issue)
Categorization of genres aren't intuitive. (Rating 2 - minor usability issue)

1/2

Unreliable Search Functionalities

Finicky Filters

Both new and previous users had major difficulty effectively using filters to narrow down a search. Too often the filters simply weren’t applied in search results or weren’t successfully carried over in back-to-back searches. Some filters were only visible after a certain point in the search flow.

“Trying to find the filter for this weekend, cannot find the date filter” (P4)

“Change how the dates work (doesn't save)” (P8)

Ineffective search bar module (left) and hidden filters (right)

Confusing Search Results

Three of our participants tried to search for genre by typing the genre (comedy) directly into the search bar, but the search bar doesn’t support searching by genre. It doesn't provide desired results and users are forced to browse through categories. This resulted in high task failure rate.

"It says we found 21 matches for country concert but in the events it has 0, so I would think there's no concert but why would you say 21 matches?" (P7)

2.75 / 5 average satisfaction rating.
2.8 / 5 average confidence rating.

Mismatching CTA (left) and search results (right)

2/2

Browse by Category (If you can find it)

Low Hierarchy of Browse by Category

We found that users perceived the Browse by Category feature to be more useful than the ad banner near the top of the Discover page.

“I would want to move browse by category higher” (P5)

“Browse by category should be at the top” (P3)

“If you didn't have the awareness to scroll down you might not find it” (P6)

Poor discoverability of Browse by Category

Unintuitive Categories

Confusion around the categorization of genres surfaced during the last task of exploring for comedy shows without using the search bar. Two participants assumed ‘Comedy’ was under the Family Category, not Arts & Theater. We rated this issue at a 2 since all participants were eventually able to complete the task within 5 to 16 clicks.

“I pressed art and theatre but I'm not really sure” (P6)

Categorization become unintuitive when condensed to fit into 4

Redesign

What Now?

We found the problems. Here are the solutions.

Card Sort

We asked participants to sort the different genres within Arts & Theater and Family into a few different groups. We redesigned the categorization based on the results. We purposefully included the most ambiguous genres in both categories to achieve higher task success rates.

Redesigning the Search Module

Reflecting our research results, I brought the Browse by Category into the search modal. This promotes the use of browse to users in their search flow, and makes the feature itself difficult to miss.

Reflection

Test-Ready

This project was an extremely potent dose of user testing; Further familiarizing myself with usability studies, A/B testing, and to turn test results into meaningful solutions without breaking the existing system.

It was a great pleasure reminding myself just why we gather data before designing anything.

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