Historically, the performing arts industry has been heavily reliant on a heavy personal touch in order to acquire and retain a portfolio of regular patrons. With the rise of e-commerce, these venues needed to be able to adopt new strategies to capture potential new patrons into their community. One of these “new” strategies was online ticketing.
When I joined AudienceView, the Professional product offered a basic e-commerce store where they can sell tickets and other products, and collect donations. Built in the mid-2000s, it was very barebones and visually outdated. We had many clients who were hesitant to renew their contracts because of these issues. I set out to discover how we could revitalize the online store with 3 main goals in mind:
- Visual updates, in order to better showcase events for potential patrons.
- Architecture updates with simplicity and clarity being the driving principles. We wanted to build a ticket buying experience that was as straight forward as modern e-commerce shops.
- Additional high value features based on client feedback. This would feed into our long term roadmap for the online store.
This project resulted in redesigning the main Events page where customers start their purchase funnel, and two ways customers choose their tickets, Best Available ticketing and the Seating Chart used for specific seating, as well as a roadmap for a new checkout flow.
Research
Looking at our limited data from 2018 onwards through Google Analytics, I compiled performance indicators that stood out from the rest in order to begin identifying the areas we needed to focus on. Some were easy to attribute to the design itself, backed up by past feedback and usability tests. However, we lacked up to date foundational research on the existing experience and pain points. I conducted numerous patron interviews over 2 months with an emphasis on a broad range of demographics and theatre experience in order to uncover insights that helped our team understand the entire patron journey.
Key questions we wanted to answer during the patron research study
Our patron customer journey informed through our research
Basic patron archetypes with key questions we need to solve for
As a primarily B2B business, figuring out our patron experience was only half of what we needed. I conducted interviews with 5 select clients in order to discover how we can use the online store to grow their business.
Key questions we wanted to answer during the patron research study
From our interviews and data I was able to identify gaps regarding discoverability, clarity, and retention. Here are 4 key takeaways selected from our findings:
4 key takeaways from our research
Project Planning
In collaboration with our product manager, I created a list of projects broken down into 3 categories: basic necessities, high value features, and delightful improvements that had low impact. We gave each project RICE scores, and used the resulting ranking as our roadmap priority list.