The setup and outcome of our current ticket designer on Back Office

The Problem

Using a legacy system is difficult, but what's even more difficult is moving out of it. Currently, our operators/clients use a legacy system called "Back Office" to create tickets for their events - this means using an outdated and hard-to-use platform to create a ticket that thousands of fans are going to use and keep in their mobile wallets.

As part of our company-wide goal to move out of the Back Office and into our Pac Platform, we've decided that the process of creating and designing a mobile ticket should be first to go. Clients were also converting to 100% mobile tickets, making the need to create mobile tickets at its highest.

DISCOVERY

Where to Start?

Luckily, it's been years since mobile passes came about and we were able to collect tons of existing data and also collect new data from our great clients. Our clients were more than willing to participate in our studies because they were thrilled to hear about Ticket Designer being modernized!

🕵️ Go-To-Market Team

Our GTM team was made up of business folks, product, client partners, and engineers. We met up weekly to align on goals, discuss technical feasibility, timelines, and receive input for early concept designs.

💡 Pioneer Meetings

Our "pioneers" are clients who volunteer once a quarter to provide feedback about our software and get first dibs on any new products coming out. I used this time to present our goals, the problems we're trying to solve, early designs, and even received many volunteers for usability testing.

🗒️ Client Interviews

I conducted around 10 client interviews and built a storyline through learning pain points and history using current methods to create tickets. Understanding how our users worked and designed tickets at the time were our biggest goals out of the interviews.

⏳ Feedback from Existing Platform

By understanding how to build a ticket today and collecting feedback that's been piled up for years, it helped us better grasp the pain points of the existing platform.

User Interviews and Usability Testing

I interviewed 10 clients from college athletics, performing arts, and arenas. After our interviews, we moved onto usability testing of the early ticket designer concepts.

INTERVIEW GOALS

Understand the process and pain points clients have to build a ticket
How often do they use certain features (custom fields on tickets, custom back rows, section overrides)?
Understand the approval process and who is usually in charge of creating mobile tickets
Identify what can we add to make the ticket designing process easier for clients of any skill level

"We're trying to move to 100% NFC tickets next year. There's not really a need for us to have important information on the back of the pass - sometimes we use the custom fields on the front as a workaround for things we can't accomplish with the current ticket building process."
- TJ @ Wells Fargo Arena (past client)

"I'm the only one who creates the tickets since it's way too complicated to make a ticket right now. Although most of the time we use the same colors and images, it's still extremely tedious to create tickets even though they could look almost exactly the same as tickets we've made in the past. Things like cropping images and knowing HEX codes have also been a struggle since I'm not a designer and this isn't what my main job entails."
- Ben @ Cincinatti Arts

DISCOVERY

Results

We learned a lot about WHO our users are and WHAT their process is with creating tickets. We were able to gather the problems that our users had with the current method in creating a ticket through our legacy system and used our GTM meetings to discuss solutions. Although most of the problems were apparent after just looking at the legacy system, many new problems were discovered after talking to our clients.

🕵️ Our users are NOT designers

Clients have to use HEX codes, understand what colors are accessible to read, and crop their own photos. These skills are not required for their normal everyday job!

💡 Creating a ticket takes too much time

These tickets are created with the contents already known (event name and time/date, cover photo, school/brand colors), yet it still took our clients an average of 1 hour+ to design a ticket.

Existing legacy system used to create a mobile ticket

DESIGN

Increasing efficiency and time saved

Creating a ticket no longer had to feel tedious and manual. With our duplication feature, color wheel with preset colors (no more having to look up team colors!), saved templates, and automated codes, clients no longer have to waste time looking up and inputting the same information and images multiple times.

Read-only fields are automatically curated from other fields to reduce repetitiveness and colors can now be saved as presets

HIGHLIGHTS

Easier workflow

With our cropping tool and color wheel, clients no longer need to spend a long time training employees to perform skills that aren't needed for their everyday job AND manual tasks outside of the tool were no longer needed.

Clients can now visually see colors, images, and a preview of the ticket making it easier to understand how to build a ticket

HIGHLIGHTS

Live Preview

With the live preview of tickets and ability to directly save tickets, clients can visually see how their tickets look like as they're designing it versus having to manually send themselves a ticket to their mobile phone each time they make a small change.

Clients can easily take screenshots of the ticket for a quick and easy review process

HIGHLIGHTS

Preventing User Error

Manual tasks such as giving your tickets a "Format Code" and assigning a font color are now automated (also great for accessibility purposes).

With the addition of Additional Notes, automatic saves with time stamps, and the live preview, users will know immediately if they're on the wrong ticket before they waste time making updates.

Tickets can be personalized with custom notes and names to reduce the amount of times users try editing the incorrect ticket

Success

After 8 months of discovery, solutioning, development, and countless UX review sessions, Ticket Designer was finally live! We started off with a few early access clients and received all positive feedback. There were a few tweaks to be made, but releasing Ticket Designer resulted in tons of praise from the company and our clients.

Read more about it below:
Ticket Designer, the ultimate tool to create and customize mobile tickets with ease.
Cruising in the Fast Lane: Ticket Designer and the Top 5 Fastest Ticket Creators.

90%

Reduction in time to design
a mobile ticket

100%

Adoption rate

<5 min

Average time to design a mobile ticket

100%

Satisfaction rate