Case Study 04
Festival Ticketing
for the Future
AEG needed a revitalized, faster and more robust ticketing system to handle the demand of the most popular music festivals.
Role
Director of Product Design, AXS
AXS XFN Teams
UX Research, UI Design, Project Management, Engineering, Product, Growth
AEG XFN Teams
UX, Engineering, Project Management, Product, Festival Teams
Music festivals are constantly evolving
Objective
AEG and AEG Presents came to AXS with a supersized project – the relaunch and redesign of their main ticketing Ecomm flow for Coachella, StageCoach and the most popular music festivals in the world. It needed to handle complex, multi-day packages as well as handle the high-demand day of sales.
Key Results
Multiple pods and teams from across AXS and AEG created an entirely new sales engines and code – and unlike it’s predeccesor, this platform could be deployed in both native apps and embedded websites. Due to it’s flexible nature, ability to handle multiple inventory setups from merch to hotel rooms and it’s increased performance, this new system quickly became the story for the following festival season. This launch further solidified the symbiotic nature that AEG and AXS could have when it came to selling music festivals. There was a noticable decrease in system errors (150% decrease) and a significant drop in customer complaints during onsales - a common success metric for the festival experience aside from the ability to obtain high demand tickets.
Defining the right approach
One of the first steps that we had to take was identifying how robust the effort would be in terms of how many touchpoints this news EComm flow would impact. Very shortly into the project, the Design team correctly identified that while the initial effort would see it’s first release as a festival product – ultimately, this updated sales flow should be flexible enough to eventually become the primary ticketing flow for all of AXS. Subsequently, the project was appropriately given the codename Goliath. Design was also given the lead in terms of project roadmapping, both an awesome and terrifying prospect, but we rose to the occasion.
Discovery Highlight: Modular Flexibility
Once it was determined how far reaching Goliath’s touchpoints would be inside AXS and AEG, research and discovery were immediately prioritized. From dozens of interviews with festival organizers to festival attendees, it was critical that we understood the pros and cons of the old system as well as the bucket list of desires that all parties involved would want a new system to facilitate. Journey maps and flows were drawn up, A/B wires were tested, and continual feedback was gathered. Pain points were identified and personas became the drivers for how we would design the experience. A modular UI was designed to respond to the various needs of the customers.
High demands and high demand sales
As aforementioned, one of the biggest requirements that needed to be addressed was Goliath’s ability to sell multiple inventory types. This included festival merchandise, hotel packages, parking passes and VIP experiences to mention just a few. Due to the inherent differences in these types of products, affordances for flexibility were high. However, in that same breadth, we had to make sure that when carting these items, the experience was also consistent, no matter what type of item was being carted and purchased.
Robust UIs and White Labeling
Along with a flexible shopping cart, brand flexibility was also important in authoring Goliath. Most, if not all music festivals are sticklers when it comes to maintaining their brand. So even with a consistent EComm flows, it was critical that fonts and colors and images would need to have affordances for white labeling. Coachella wanted to make sure it looked like a Coachella shopping cart and Splashhouse wanted to make sure that you stayed in their world from browsing to checkout.