TodayTix - unlocking discovery & user engagement in the first digital Broadway ticket provider

USER RESEARCH, EXPERIENCE CONCEPTING, PRODUCT DESIGN

Doberman partnered with TodayTix, a live entertainment ticket provider within the arts known most for bringing Broadway tickets into the palm of your hand in a market traditionally not digital. The ease of theater ticket purchase online initially brought TodayTix much success, but continued growth & securing trust in the market has remained a challenge.

The ask: Increase customer engagement & drive conversion by improving the TodayTix experience for first-time users.

My role: Product design intern contributing to ideation of features to increase discoverability & engagement, wireframe concept flows, iterate on higher-fidelity InVision prototypes with the design team & facilitated 7 user interviews for concept validation.

The team consisted of two Designers, a Creative Director, Business Developer & Project Manager. The project was 7 weeks.

Ideation of features to increase discoverability & engagement

Based on problems discovered during discovery & immersion, the team ideated features around 3 main How Might We statements:

1. HMW help drive the discoverability of theater shows?

2. HMW to increase trust of the product?

3. HMW increase engagement after first time purchase?
   

The output of our ideation was a collage of illustrative features. This collage was used as a conversation tool with TodayTix to identify features that felt right for the TodayTix brand vision & help guide our experience concepting sessions.

Two concepts emerged:
The Cultured Friend & The Agent

Building trust & increased discoverability of shows took form in two chosen concepts for the future of TodayTix. “The Cultured Friend” relying more heavily on social media & FOMO mentality of millennials, while “The Agent” was driven by getting users as quickly & efficiently to purchase.

These contrasting concepts & initial feature sets became the building blocks for our next step: wireframing the user flow from discovery to purchase.

Wireframing key moments of discoverability & engagement based on our feature hypotheses

Our two concepts were wireframed to further iterate on proposed features & to help us better understand what we hoped to validate during user testing. My responsibility was to wireframe one of the concepts ,“The Cultured Friend,” as seen below.

Moving our wireframes into higher fidelity designs & InVision prototypes for testing

We interviewed a mixture of new & current TodayTix users in order to capture a range of perspectives on our prototypes. The interviews were conducted using an open question style interview format to dive deeper into user needs as well as specific tasks in each concept.

Testing goals:

1. Identify the concepts & features that resonate most with both current & prospective users
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2. Gather input on which features or concepts warrant further exploration.


3. Uncover any unmet needs or opportunities.

I facilitated all 7 user interviews using our click-through InVision prototypes & lead the team in our interview synthesis to be shared with the client.

Final prototype based of insights from user testing synthesis

After sharing our user testing synthesis with TodayTix, the team moved forward with merging & refining promising features validated during testing into a final higher-fidelity prototype. I contributed to iterations of the final screens with the design team.

Final delivery to the client included all research synthesis presentations, wireframes, prototypes used during testing, & our final refined prototype based on user feedback. Our work is to be used by TodayTix’s design & development team as inspiration for brand & development moving forward.

Final thoughts & personal learnings

Some of my biggest learnings during the project include:

• Illustrative feature sets as strong tool to share ideas from the team’s ideation session to inspire & align with the client.

• Inviting members from the client side for portion of testing synthesis helps build sense of collaboration & trust with client as well as a means of sharing research processes with clients interested in incorporating methodologies internally in their future research.

• Prototyping contrasting concepts & features helps more clearly delineate the heat in user reactions & what users react positively or negatively towards during testing. This contrast makes it easier to probe users reasoning & needs.