Safe & Sound Seattle’s website originally focused on helping music venues safely reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they later pivoted to hosting their own live music events. The website became a ticketing platform for the concerts.
Initially, the platform experienced high traffic, but users started to quickly drop-off.
I aimed to reduce user drop-off by redesigning the user flow for buying concert tickets. I did this by emphasizing interactive elements, improving page loading speeds, and reducing the number of steps to access tickets.
This project ended early due to budget constraints. Still, I learned invaluable lessons on how to adapt to constraints in a small organization and how small improvements can make significant impacts.
Team
UX Designer Product Manager
Timeframe
3 weeks
Problem
Long loading times and lengthy pages created a time-consuming experience for users trying to buying tickets.
Reviewing analytics and conducting a heuristic evaluation, I identified two problems users were experiencing: Pages took too long to load (5+ seconds) and the tickets page had a number of issues that impacted ease-of-use.
1
Background reduces text readability
2
Band names only appear in picture and may be easily missed
3
Inconsistent spacing for text
4
Vertical placement of logos lengthens page
5
Users must scroll to bottom to find tickets
Goal
With a short timeline, I focused on improving the end-to-end user flow for buying tickets.
To ensure I could accomplish this task, I broke down the goal into four main objectives:
Reduce time it takes to navigate to tickets page
Minimize the number of clicks to find and navigate to the tickets page.
Reduce scroll time to find seats
Move the seating chart to the top and improve the visual hierarchy of the tickets page.
Increase visibility of upcoming events
The current website only shows the next event. Including more would allow more options for users.
Develop cohesive designs across pages
Parts of the website are still geared towards music venues rather than concert goers, causing confusion.
Research insights
Our limited research budget meant I had to get creative to discover what users valued when buying tickets.
Users found it difficult to navigate to tickets
The community engagement team was able to gather user feedback that emphasized users' desire for a faster process in finding tickets.
Our website didn't align with users' mental models
Our website didn't follow users' expectations for buying tickets online, so I analyzed competitors' websites to determine best practices.
From our user data, I pared down our tickets page to reflect user needs.
The adjusted visual hierarchy prioritized information (such as band name, date, and time) and interactions users needed to buy tickets.
Users also noted initial confusion about our homepage when first visiting our website.
Our quick pivot had left the website inconsistent. The homepage's design was still geared towards our previous users, music venues, with little indication that users could buy tickets on our website.
I focused on ensuring the call-to-action buttons on the homepage led users to buying tickets so the task was no longer buried.
User interviews revealed our lack of upcoming events may have contributed to user drop-off.
If a user wasn't interested in the musical act or couldn't make it on that day, there was no reason for them to stay on the website.
As we were now booking more acts, this became a great opportunity to feature our recent bookings on the homepage.
Final designs
An updated website where users can easily find upcoming events and tickets:
Learnings
The quick turnaround time for this project challenged me to be resourceful and define success metrics that could be easily tracked.
Getting resourceful
Even without a budget for user research, I gained valuable insights by collaborating with the community engagement team to gather user feedback.
Tracking metrics
Had the project continued, I would have used metrics like time on task and completion rates to measure success.
