TicketsNow

Find the best tickets, even at the last minute

Platform: Progressive Web App (PWA)
Role: Lead Product Designer, User Research, Brand and Marketing
Year: 2019-2020

THE CHALLENGE

Today’s traveler books flights and accommodations online months ahead of their trip, usually involving hours of research and painstaking planning. Once those travelers arrive at their destination, however, we noticed an emerging trend: 85% of travelers book their entertainment, tours and activities after arriving at their destination, often on the same day. These last-minute customers want the best tickets but don’t want to spend their precious vacation time scouring recommendations and comparing prices. How might we help travelers efficiently discover experiences and conveniently purchase tickets in-destination? 

UNDERSTANDING TODAY'S TRAVELER

Leisure travelers used to plan a trip around a concert or book a Broadway show months in advance. Not anymore. After deep-diving in market research, we found that the modern traveler, accustomed to instant purchases and one-day shipping, treat booking tours and activities like buying a movie theater ticket for later that night. 

We decided to focus our assumption on Las Vegas, an entertainment capital for both continental travelers and Southern California residents seeking a weekend getaway. Historically, Vegas guests would consult a concierge for a recommendation or stand in line at the box office for a day-of deal. As hotels reduce staff touchpoints and ticketing moves online, both methods did not meet current customer expectations. 

I started with stakeholder and user interviews with Las Vegas hotel staff, venue managers and regular guests to understand historical context, customer expectations and business constraints. Using my experience as a former journalist, I created scripts, scheduled interviews and allowed space for conversations to veer in interesting directions. I learned that travelers didn’t need the biggest or best attraction in town but simply “didn’t want to regret” their use of valuable vacation time. I also learned that in Las Vegas, all tickets are discount tickets to bargain-demanding customers.

OPERATING IN AMBIGUITY

The metaphor of seeking recommendations from a concierge easily lent itself to conversational UI (CUI). The team was gung-ho on the concept, and I was equally attracted due to my editorial background as a professional journalist. While the engineers worked on technical implementations of CUI, I began designing and testing text and voice based concepts.

It became immediately clear to me, however, that while there are worthwhile aspects of CUI, the form is better suited for one-off directives (like recalling a concert date) rather than discovery (browsing shows). I pushed the format during design discovery, but remembering our user’s goal of quickly discovering and purchasing tickets, I knew CUI was not going to work. 

Startups require operating in ambiguity, and I stepped up to the challenge by leading product strategy sessions, hosting team workshops and crafting product statements to solidify our shared understanding. I created prototypes for both the CUI concept and a new ecommerce marketplace concept and tested both with users. The results were clear: users had trouble navigating the CUI and accomplishing the set tasks. Since our users would be on-the-go and thus not have the time (or interest) in learning a new system, it simply did not meet our goals. Through some tough discussions, the team could not deny the test results, and we moved forward with the intuitive marketplace concept. I made sure I listened to each team members’ individual concerns and took them into account for our next phase.

Early explorations of the conversation concierge-bot concept

JOINING FORCES

TicketsNow partnered with local businesses representing the city’s best tours and activities. And since TicketsNow was incubated by Ticketmaster, our product was the only third-party marketplace for Ticketmaster events in Las Vegas. Aggregating this robust inventory did come with design challenges, including adapting product flows to unique offerings and designing different sized assets from a wide variety of sources. However I created a componentized system of screens and customizable flows to accommodate the varied offerings, beautifully display different types of assets, and surface a variety of promotions.

TicketsNow also partnered with Caesars Entertainment and its concierge SMS bot vendor Ivy for our initial product launch. Ivy texted every guest staying at Caesars Las Vegas properties, totalling 10. Creating and designing features meant managing client expectations and vendor capabilities, which was well worth the exposure as we continued to learn and iterate.

A high-level view of different merchant displaying in TicketsNow, including componentized page elements and optional flows.
This is just two of the many merchants that the design system had to accomodate.

DEVELOPING THE BRAND

Creating the TicketsNow’s logo started with evaluating the brand’s identity and voice. Since I was fully immersed in the concept, I understood that the TicketsNow brand is enthusiastic, friendly and trustworthy. Furthermore, the brand stands out by not being pretentious, members only or VIP, as so often seen in Las Vegas. Compared with the invisible brands dominating the travel activities market, I wanted TicketsNow to stand out as a destination epitomizing fun. 

When creating a logo, I made sure that it would work responsively and adapt to different contexts like web, email and marketing. After creating a variety of concepts, collecting feedback and testing, I settled on a high-impact design that could easily adapt to size or context. The NOW stands out to reinforce the last-minute nature of the product that resonated well with test participants.

I created a design system that focused on consistency, scale, and most importantly fun. Since travel is such a joyful experience, I wanted the visual aesthetic of the product to follow. By using deep shades of secondary colors like magenta and teal, the colors differentiated TicketsNow with a youthful yet trustworthy look and feel. Wide, full-width buttons docked at the bottom of purchase flows allowed for easy tapping on-the-go. And prominently featuring event images and videos allowed for guests to make quick decisions about whether they were interested in the event. Furthermore, all design elements were created with accessibility in mind.

Top Left: Logo exploration. Top Right: Final logo with a portion of the design system colors.

LAST-MINUTE MARKETPLACE

By understanding the user’s context during travel, I designed a marketplace that encourages guests to book memorable experiences. 

By partnering with hotels and venues, TicketsNow curates events and attractions filtered by the guest’s travel dates and party size to only show what’s available to prevent choice paralysis. Guests can easily set or alter these prominent filters during discovery.

Through competitive research I discovered that nearly all competitors in the travel activity space have complicated purchase flows, unnecessary form fields and confusing messaging. Their booking experiences were designed for desktop web and are not optimized for mobile. I simplified the discovery and purchase experience, allowing users to buy tickets in just a few taps. 

Finally, I believe it’s the designer’s responsibility to advocate for the user, so security was top of mind when creating the web app. The user’s phone number is their account, and the phone their ticket. Participating hotel guests automatically have accounts created with a magic link that only share relevant information.

First: Home (Default). Second: Home with Select Date filter exposed. Third: Home (Scrolled). Fourth: Browse with filters applied.

MESSAGING & MARKETING

As a former journalist, I am a big proponent of considering research and copywriting thoughtfully at every stage of product development. Extending beyond the product UI, SMS messaging played a big role for our user journey: from a hotel guest receiving a SMS magic link, or a new user verifying their account through SMS 2-factor authentication, to securely receiving tickets by SMS. Throughout these flows, it was important for me to retain the human voice helping the guest along the way, rather than a robotic tone.

I also wrote all the emails and created a number of marketing campaigns, from physical materials at a B2B conference, an interactive rideshare video ad, and poster concepts for in-destination SMS ads. For each material, I carefully considered the audience and the context for viewing the ad. I aimed for each marketing moment to be mutually beneficial to the user as well as our business.

Interactive video advertisement featured in the back of Uber, Lyft and other rideshares, in partnership with Octopus.

RESULTS

We launched TicketsNow in February 2020 as a progressive web app that connects users to the best live events and travel activities, and the adoption and sales were immediate. I actively monitored analytics and with use of remote user testing, iterated on data-based design changes in real time. Unfortunately the COVID-19 pandemic took off just a month after launch, halting the travel industry and TicketsNow in its tracks. However the lessons learned during this startup, including successfully operating in ambiguity and creating a user-centric product from scratch, will stay with me throughout my career.

Loader animation featuring custom on-brand illustrations

BOBBY FEINGOLD

Product designer and manager with over 10 years experience working for Disney, Live Nation, and more Fortune 400 companies