My first major project roll at Ticketmaster was to lead design on a B2B, 3D product called Pitchman 2.0. The purpose of Pitchman is to give a ticket sales team the ability to create a customizable presentation to clients that have shown interest in buying tickets for their favorite teams.
The biggest tool we use for Pitchman is the Virtual Reality (VR) view, which is a way to show customer’s a 3d view from the seat they are looking to buy. Working with my Product Manager, our task was to create the front end presentation layout for the Ticket Reps to use in their presentation to their ticket buying clients. Along with presenting the client with the seat views, we also wanted to allow them to get all the information related to each seat, including price, benefits, parking and schedules.
Click here to view the prototype.
First Iteration
Here is an example of the layout of our first iteration for Pitchman. Upon landing on the homepage, the user can click into one of the seat view cards, which take them into the next page displaying the VR view at the top of the page, and benefits, parking info, etc in a sliding menu. To view another seat, the user could click on another seat card to go to that seat, and view the information about it.
Once these designs were approved, we set up user testing with our UX research team. The team uses live, self conducted interviews with real season ticket holders, as well as recorded interviews and interactive testing with Blue Acorn and UserTesting.com.
My Product Manager and I were able to guide the questions asked of the users, including the ease of use of the overall product, and other features that would be helpful in selling them the seats.
After a week of testing, listening to interviews, and watching users actually guide themselves through our product, our feedback takeaways were:
- The overall flow and presentation was great and received a high user score. Users were able to easily understand each seat they were viewing, and how to read more about the benefits, parking, etc.
- Users found it difficult to quickly navigate between each seat quickly. They kept hitting the back button on the browser to go back to the home page, and then had to start again in scrolling thru a different view. They wanted a way to navigate quickly on the same page between seats.
- Users wanted a way to compare seats they were considering in one place. The current iteration didn’t have a compare feature.
Second Iteration
Taking our user feedback, my Product Manager and I looked at ways to simplify Pitchman even further, and add a compare feature.
We started with the homepage. We added a fully interactive overhead venue view, which shows the exact location of each seat the sales rep has available. Users can quickly click on the price bubble, or utilize the right rail list view to bring up an expanded view of each seat. We also added a compare feature for each seat, allowing users to choose up to 3 seats to compare side by side quickly and easily.
Once a seat is clicked, the expanded view is opened as a modal, and also includes the details that come with each seat, such as benefits, parking, pricing, etc.
Users have the ability to compare up to 3 seats side by side by checking the Compare Box. When a seat is added, a notification appears in the top navigation menu.
Once 2 seats are added to Compare, the user can click to view the seats side by side
John Taber 