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You may be familiar with AXS if you've bought tickets to a concert lately. The app is a platform to purchase tickets for music, sports, and entertainment events globally. Users can purchase mobile tickets and receive a digital QR code. AXS was initially created to rival Ticketmaster and has exclusive access to tickets with 350+ venue partners. However, the company has a bad reputation for being unreliable and unimpressive user experience, but customers sometimes have no other choice to get their tickets.
Initially, our brief was just to give the global AXS app a local touch by tailoring it to San Francisco. After examining AXS's design at a high level, we realized three things:
1. The app was not functional at doing its core job of allowing users to buy event tickets. Errors, long time delays, and crashes led to users leaving with no return. We considered functionality as part of a bigger issue. We focused on the second and third issues for this case study.
2. AXS does not address the user's social motivation nor the frustrations of coordinating a group. How might we engage concert-goers who often (and sometimes exclusively) attend shows with friends as a social activity?
3. There is no categorization or curation of the events listed. Users admitted they would leave the app in the first couple seconds if they are not able to find anything that interests them on the home and search page.
The AXS San Francisco app focuses on supporting the user's aims to use live music events as a social getaway with a group ticket feature, allowing users to seamlessly book, plan, and manage digital tickets for a group. AXS SF also showcases curated local music events based on user's preferences from search, favorites, and past purchases. We tied all this together with increased visual interest using dark mode and emulating the concert experience.
We started with the current AXS app and noticed inconsistent pages, lackluster search/explore page, no favorites or personalized touches. The Home page lacked discoverability and delight. The UI was overly simple and non-stylized. The App Store and Google Play Store reported multitude of bugs impacting logging in, transferring tickets, and more. I experienced multiple error messages, app crashes in just the 5 minutes I spent on the app trying to purchase tickets for myself.
We researched competitors to see what features they bring that AXS might be missing.
Ticketmaster we found had the best personalization with a "For You" tab. The app saves preferences based on search history, suggests shows based on preferences, add to favorites feature.
StubHub had clean and enticing UI. The explore page was consistent and had nice large event/artist photos you could horizontally scroll. The categories such as "Popular Events" intrigued me to keep scrolling.
Vivid Seats had music and entertainment News / Blog page that linked to upcoming shows, this seemed like a good concept except there was rarely a show to link to.
Eventbrite has domination over smaller local events. There are a lot of events to look through so they have done filtering very well by using a MadLib style "fill-in-the-blank" search.
We also looked at other companies outside of the ticketing space that had seamless mobile experiences.
Spotify we were inspired by their dark mode design and their curated "For You" recommendations. We wanted to bring the same feeling of a concert having a dark background with accents of bright colors to the AXS app.
Groupon has easy to use mobile ticketing for the goods and services they sell. Buying and showing the ticket within the app is fast and convenient for the users. The flash sales and discount tactics get people to keep checking the app.
Amazon is known for many things but they do customer service really well if there is a refund or exchange. The member can do it through the app any point in the day without having to call into customer service.
DoorDash we looked at for the social features such as Group Order. On the app, you're able to text an invite to a group order to your friends or coworkers to add to the order and do separate pay on the same order.
We performed 3 usability tests on the current app design to solicit feedback from users.
We defined key user needs based on frequent patterns seen in our interviews and usability tests.
From user insights to user needs, we crafted 2 personas that are able to characterize our problem statements.
“I have to go with a big group of people. The planning can get kinda crazy but the energy is insane.”
Imani is the life of the party and brings together people from different parts of their lives to go to music shows together. They experience a lot of FOMO (fear of missing out) seeing friend's Instagram stories of concerts and RSVP to Facebook events. The group of friends they go with are fans of EDM shows only and doesn’t care for other genres or sports.
Problem: Imani enjoys the energy of a big group and finds themselves fronting the large cost of group tickets without knowing when they'll get paid back. They need a way to coordinate the tickets with a group of people because their friends aren't convinced to go without knowing social and financial logistics.
See Imani's Journey Map here
"Excited to have a fight-the-pandemic reunion and surprise everyone with tickets to a live event tonight."
Kimmy loves musicals and live jazz events! She was a proud thespian in college. She is having a fight-the-pandemic reunion with her girlfriends tonight and wants to surprise them with tickets to a musical at a small venue close to the Bistro where she is meeting them. She is not much of an app user but she's last minute hoping to look, find, and secure her purchase all during her Uber ride to the Bistro.
Problem: Kimmy needs a way to filter, find, and manage tickets to local live events and musicals that are in the Mission district where her and her local posse of friends live and dine.
From our ideation session, we had a real fear of an overload of features that might stray from what the user really needs. To target the features we'll prioritize we made a cartesian chart of all the features we brainstormed.
Going forward with our main features, we mapped out the pages of the app to get a better idea of how the flow will follow.
We created a full user flow to build upon how the app pages will flow and function. For this particular case study, I wanted to focus in on the group order flow.
See full User Flow here
See App Map here
We split up the pages to sketch and wireframe.
For our high fidelity mockups we added gradient effects and bright orange to contrast the dark mode.
I've featured the screens below I've worked on individually as part of this team project.
Music focused
We tailored our app to only cover music events to keep it relevant to what the majority of our users were searching for.
Connecting experiences
We drew inspiration from Spotify, because we wanted users to feel as though they were bringing their favorite music from home to live concerts.
Relevant categorization
Removed the infinite scroll from the previous design and instead used Tabs to allow you to filter and tailor the page based on your needs. Added "Upcoming Events" to keep it relevant and timely. Since users wanted to discover new artists, we decided to feature "Artists currently on tour" so users are able to scroll through their options easily.
No favorites page in old design
With the old design, users were not able to save events that interested them in the app.
Smart Recommendations
Unlike with a traditional favorites page, users will be able to explore smart recommendations of events and artists based off of purchase history and saved events.
Events nested under the Artist
In the old design of the event page, there were individual event pages for each date of the tour. As part of our design, we grouped event listings under the artist name so that all dates can be viewed on one page. By arranging it in this way, users will gain a better understanding of all the options available to them and will make the decision in fewer steps.
Keep Groups Together
Users can now name and create a group order that keeps their group tickets together. If there are assigned seats, the group tickets will sell seats next to each other.
Payment options
We found in user interviews that payment options were needed for groups. Often one person buys for the whole group and is responsible for charging individuals for their tickets. Now, users can pay for their individual ticket with ease.
Users joining via the group order link can skip straight to the payment rather than trying to navigate the app and find the event themselves.
Link to prototype
Knowing that the target users are going to events in groups, I'd like to focus in on additional group features.
Learnings from usability tests of new designs
- Design layout, icons, structure makes sense to users
- Address privacy concern of where data may be collected
- Indications of location needed under the search bar
- Group order flow needs a better introduction to user
Group features
- AXS SF would be first to market in the ticketing space by providing a group order function, creating a differentiation factor to competitors.
- If I had more time I also considered building an expansion to group features such as RSVP list that links to Facebook events.
Constraints to measuring outcomes
With this being a conceptual project, we had constraints on what outcomes we could test and measure.
If given the opportunity I would test the conversion rates of the new designs against the previous design to compare the bounce rates.
Additionally, the error messages need to be discussed with developers and product managers. This seems to be an ongoing issue and resources need to be allocated to fixing these bugs for users to have consistent experiences.
Constraints to data for curated events
Users will have to go through an onboarding process that collects information of preferences and make an account to save this data for each time they come back to the app. Users could also further customize their feed by linking to outside accounts like Spotify and be notified of their favorite artists who are on tour.
