They wanted a way to suggest specific music festivals to users, making it easier to decide . This was a big project generating potentially thousands of new webpages on Festicket’s e-commence platform reaping multiple benefits moving forward. Essentially we wanted to make finding the perfect festival much easier for the user by making educated suggestions based on festival line ups and user’s Spotify listening history.
Carrying out UX processes to accomplish a user-friendly foundation to make sure product would meet both users and Festicket’s needs. I was introduced to a range of UX methods from creating user personas, competitive analysis of existing products and mapping out userflows/user journeys to wire framing and interactive prototyping contextualising the UI stage of the project.
The potential for this project holds many benefits, ultimately we wanted to be able to recommend festivals to users with greater granularity, making the user experience at Festicket more personalised. Other benefits include piggy-backing on ‘lineup wave’ announcements to target relevant emails to users who have express interests in specific artists or festivals.
The core ambition is for this to be a holistic product that can function and live outside of the user’s one-time visit to Festicket.com. Festicket can become a proactive, intelligent assistant to keep users informed about new lineups with minimal user exertion.
Three main challenges were identified in the scope of this project:
We broke the project down into three sprints to manage the workload to a reasonable deadline. Improving the on boarding flow would provide users with a curated discovery experience from the outset and encourage users to make an account and return to the site for regular updates. This was the main focus area during the first sprint of the project.
We prototyped multiple onboarding flows and opened the floor to the rest of the team for a design critique. It became clear that we had to streamline this process in order to onboard users quickly but extracting enough information to show benefits of a curated experience.
It didn’t make sense to include both Spotify and Facebook as logging in options as Spotify needs Facebook authentication in order to allow a new account o be created. This resulted in adding needless steps to the onboarding flow. We also didn’t want to direct users to a second flow, distracting them from creating a Festicket account. Also, users are generally signing up to complete an existing task, we don’t want to then give them another task to complete (finding artists), before returning to their initial goal. The Spotify step needed to be made clear it was “extra”, and can be returned to at any given time and be separated from the sign up flow if needed.
We decided only to show two sign up options, Facebook and Email which direct the user down the same path. email preferences would show after signup and before the user starts selecting artists to curate their experience. This acts as confirmation and bridges the gap between signing up and completing the profile. Introducing the concept of ‘complete your profile’ for both pre-exising and new users will encourage the user to firstly complete their current task and then head back to the onboarding flow to start making artists selections.
The second sprint of the project concentrated on Artist Profiles. These needed to be sustainable and scalable in order to be automatically generated when a new artist is added to a festival lineup.
Content generated on these pages needed to help SEO ranking and boost organic traffic visiting Festicket. The team figured we could use content such as artist bios and profile pictures generated by Spotify to display on the Artist Pages. This gave us less control over content displayed on these pages and meant the UI would have to accommodate scenarios where the artists profile isn’t centred or there was no biography available so a placeholder element should take it’s place until manually written by our content team.
We also wanted to find dynamic ways of displaying content to the user instead of merely suggesting relevant festivals. The user needs avenues to discover new artists and festivals through genre, country and popularity. It made sense to break the page down into sections introducing a hero with splash imagery of the artist. Using metadata from past user searches we can see how users discover festivals through keywords and organise content displayed based on this.
The final sprint involved the creation of a ‘homepage’ for the artists pages. Somewhere for users to get an overall idea of how they can find new artists and what’s trending right now.
We wanted to make this page look interesting without peppering it with too many banners. Each section needed to offer the user a different angle in which to discover new festivals through artist selection. A ‘Featured’ section would give the user an uncurated look of Festicket’s selection of artists that they would like to push. ‘Suggested’ artists is a curated section based on artists followed during the onboarding process or through past exploration of the artist pages. A ‘My Artists’ section could give the user a place to review the artists they follow to check if there is any recent activity since they last visited these specific pages.
After design critique with stakeholders and further iterations this concept launched in August 2019. This MVP gives us better insight on how the user discovers new festivals and how Festicket can give greater value as a point of contact when searching for potential festivals. Metadata collected from how users interact with these pages gives us a starting on further improving the discovery experience but the launch of this product is a good starting point for iteration. SEO rankings have been improved as these new pages rank higher on google due to artist keyword search results. In turn this generates more traffic flowing through Festicket. Emails are now targeted based on user’s ‘favourited’ artists so we can deliver more relevant content, encouraging users to return to Festicket.com.
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
luke.ui.work@gmail.com
