Overview
Brown Paper Tickets is a platform for buying tickets and hosting ticket sales. For this project, my team was responsible for creating a responsive website, creating easier browsing experience on mobile, and opening up possibilities for event creators to compose more complex pages. As a UX Designer and Researcher on this project, I allowed my team to gain a better understanding of event creator's needs and collaborated with my team to create a high fidelity prototype of these pages.
Prototypes
Here you can view the event maker prototype and the ticket buyer prototype.
Team
Sam Aaronson: UX Designer/ UX Writer, Sophie Lindheimer: UX Designer/ UX Researcher
Helping two types of users
From the get-go, my team realized that we needed to solve the problems of two distinct users, the ticket buyer, and the event creator. To do this, my team decided to do two versions of research, planning, designing and testing – one for each type of user – and also create two prototypes. I primarily focused on the event creation side of the project and will specifically focus on that in this case study.
Problem: Event creators need tools that will allow them to connect with ticket buyers so they can communicate event information to them and target specific demographics.
Solution: Redesign the event pages so that event creators can have more of an identity and presence on the website. Incorporate social media components so that ticket buyers can follow event creators.
What I learned: Be extra cautious about order of operations when re-designing a form.
Understanding the event host
I was primarily responsible for user research on my team and sent out two screener surveys as well as conducted 5 of 7 user interviews (4 with event hosts and 1 with a ticket buyer). In the interviews, I spoke to a diverse group of event hosts and was able to learn about the needs of an indie musician hosting backyard parties as well as someone that owned their own event company.
To understand the data I collected in these interview, I decided to make an affinity map with my team. I wrote out distinct pieces of data that I collected on separate sticky notes in Miro and my team organized the data points into categories. From this exercise, several themes about event host needs and behavior emerged, including:
- “I use multiple platforms to promote my event”
- “I need easier ways to connect with my attendees”
- “I have an understanding of my attendance numbers and demographics”
In order to synthesize the themes I gathered from interviews, my team created the persona, Evelyn, a 35 year old Event Promoter based in Seattle. Evelyn is devoted to the EDM scene in the PNW, specifically the festival community. Promoting events comes naturally for her because of her large social network but lately she has been looking for a better way to communicate with ticket buyers and attendees”
Solving for Evelyn
Thinking about Evelyn’s goals and frustrations, I was prompted to ask the following questions:
- How might we make it easy for event hosts and ticket buyers to easily contact each?
- How might we allow Evelyn to use Brown Paper Tickets like a social media platform or allow her to easily connect it to others that she uses?
Questions on customization
At this point in the project (several days in), I found myself asking this question. Looking back at my interviews, I realized we needed more data about what event hosts value while creating and posting events. Only one of the users I interviewed posted their events on a ticketing website.
It seemed a little late in the game for this, as we were already getting into the planning phase of our sprint and wanted to stick with our deliverable timeline. Sam’s solution for this problem was to gather a sampling of reviews made by event hosts on various ticketing websites. These were the main takeaways:
- “They require too many pieces of information to complete an event.”
- “I want more options to customize. You are only able to customize a description and a specific size image.”
These user insights gave me a better understanding of what features Evelyn might want when creating an event.
Simplifying the form
Now that we had gathered enough research, we were in the planning phase. My team decided that for Evelyn’s user flow we would focus on the event creation process. As I worked on creating this user flow with Sophie, I began to realize that we were essentially re-designing a giant form and that we would need to reorganize the information architecture of the form in order to simplify it and to allow for more customization.
In order to better visualize the form and it’s sections, I created an outline of the existing form and began to carefully re-arrange some of the components. Sophie and I previously discussed making the event creation page like a template that Evelyn could fill out. This page could allow for more customization and would help Evelyn visualize what the page would look like when published. With this in mind, and with the goal of simplifying the form, I developed the following form sections:
- Basic Event Info
- Tickets & Payment
- Search Options
- Covid-19 Options
- Advanced Settings
Previously, there were 9 form sections so narrowing it down to 5 felt like an improvement. I decided to make an Advanced Settings section because I wanted an easy way to distinguish necessary and optional input sections of the form. While making this outline I was asking “How might we please users who want a lot of customization options while not overwhelming users who want to complete a simple form?”
Sketches & Low-fi Prototypes
I continued to collaborate with Sophie on the Event Host side of the project through the Design phase. We did a white boarding exercise to help us figure out what the new event creation pages should look like and created several user flows.
our ideas and the general format that the form would take we both separately worked on sketches and then reconvened I then proceeded to make lo-fi wireframes that combined elements from both of our sketches.
While designing this template-style page, I wanted to make sure to include a map, easy way to include social media, as well as Evelyn’s profile and a link to her contact info. I asked myself a number of questions:
- Does it make sense that the input fields will be larger than that section of the actual event page?
- Where does it make sense for all of the information to go on the page?
Ultimately, I tried to organize the page so that the most important information would be at the top and take an “F shape”.
"Invisible Form" aspirations
As I worked on designing the lo-fi sketches, my goal was to make an “invisible form”, or a form that is so intuitive and easy to use, a user doesn’t really think about it. To accomplish this I sought to:
- Include a progress bar
- Divide fields into semantic groups
- Mark optional fields instead of mandatory fields
- Give explanations when asking for specific data
- Keep the form in one column
- Differentiate primary from secondary actions
- Provide logical sequencing
- Keep it short
Once I had drawn out my low-fi wireframes and showed them to my team I began to translate the prototype into a high-fi version using Sophie's stye guide.
Usability testing
To see if the prototype I created was intuitive, I conducted two usability tests with users that I previously interviewed. Usability testing in this project was both a humbling and eye opening experience–it showed me what I overlooked because I still had a limited understanding of the needs and frustrations of event hosts when creating events. Specifically, I gained the following insights:
- One must really consider the order of operation of input forms on a page
- It may be beneficial to integrate several fields into one section
- Event Hosts often need to have a legal and liabilities section on their event page
- Age guidelines need to be made clear on the event page
- The purpose of the Covid-19 page needs to be more clear and should be optional
- It is unclear that the sidebar also functions as a progress bar
Take-aways & next steps
My biggest takeaway was to find the right users to interview. Even though I interviewed four event hosts, the majority of them didn’t have enough experience with creating ticked events. This left gaps in my understanding of how I could help an event host life Evelyn. Another takeaway was to spend more time on designing the information architecture of the form I created.
Continuing on with this project, I would like to go back to the research and planning phases, specifically interviewing more users and more thoroughly planning out the form.