EVENTBRITE EVENT GROUPS

When Eventbrite first launched they targeted and catered to a pretty simple type of event. These events were usually general admission and one-off occurrences. As the company grew so did the types of events using the platform, this simple event model needed to evolve to cater to a larger variety of events and user needs.

 

One of the first things to be added to the core functionality was the ability for an organizer to schedule multiple instances of the same event. These repeating events enabled us to serve all manner of new customers, for example classes, workshops, tours and performances. They were still general admission events where the main differences being the date and/or time and potentially ticket prices. This allowed organizers to setup an event once and run it numerous times with little additional effort, it proved to be a huge revenue win for the company.

 

Fast forward to 2017 and after the success of our reserved seating product we started to see a need for more complex repeating seated events. These types of events took the form of multi day music festivals or conferences, a series of theatre performances or music concerts through to sporting seasons in seated stadiums. Our business development team saw this as a huge opportunity to capture these more complex grouped events and continue to move us up market into larger venues with an on average higher priced ticket.

 

So my team was tasked to partner with a Bay Area college football team to try and understand this type of event better and develop a solution that would enable us to service sporting seasons.

 

My Role & Team

My role of Senior UX architect and system designer was to investigate how these events operate, build user empathy and identify core needs for the V1 sporting seasons product. The work encompassed mixed methods of research across different key categories to determine a common set of features ensuring any solution would scale. At the heart of all these types of events is a fairly consistent event grouping model, it is a repeating instance of the same event with a variety of differences across each vertical. The biggest difference was the ability to sell tickets to more than a single event, this generally manifested as season tickets, multi game packages and/or annual renewable memberships. A massive change to our existing event and ticket data models, add to that seat assignment across multiple days and things got complex pretty quickly.

It was a small cross functional team, comprising myself and another product designer, six engineers a product manager and executive sponsor. We worked closely with our business development partner and sales team, product marketing and customer service representatives.
 

Research Goals

Perform primary research analyzing existing product solutions in market and interview representatives from key categories being;

• Sporting teams running seasons

• Performing arts series or programs

• Multi-day music and film festivals

• Multi-session conferences and classes

Seek to understand the context around each grouping model

• Noting features and aspects of content presentation and display strategies

• Determine methods and best practice around selling multi event tickets

• Determine the role reserved seating functionality plays in grouped events

• Uncover unmet needs, identify complexities and opportunities to innovate in this space.

 

Use these insights to inform product requirements and future design work.

 

Research Methodology

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• Survey of 4,000 existing Eventbrite organizers who identify as operating multiple instance events. Goal being to understand existing organizers better who are most likely to use new group based features.

• Review 15 comparable websites across target categories

• Interview 15 users responsible for managing events across target categories

 

Deliverables

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• A research deck and presentation with leadership and stakeholders to cover findings and key insights.

• A revised event listing design specifically targeting sporting seasons and multi instance ticket types.

• Concept designs for a new content management solution and update to our existing event creation product.