The Client
TimeOut Group is the leading global media and entertainment business that inspires and enables people to make the most of the city. Locally, TimeOut New York is the premier publication and website for finding fun things to do around the city. From arena-style mega-concerts to a local neighborhood food festival, TimeOut New York has it all.
The Scope
Our three-person team played the role of an agency UX team tasked with developing a new application proposal for our existing client, TimeOut New York. We were given free reign to develop an idea worthy of being a separate app (as opposed to a feature integration) that would appeal to the client both for its purpose and its business goals.
The Client
TimeOut Group is the leading global media and entertainment business that inspires and enables people to make the most of the city. Locally, TimeOut New York is the premier publication and website for finding fun things to do around the city. From arena-style mega-concerts to a local neighborhood food festival, TimeOut New York has it all.
The Opportunity
TimeOut New York is perhaps the most comprehensive repository of events, outings, and general “stuff to do” in New York City. Often the go-to place to find theater outings, smaller shows at bars, festivals, fine dining adventures, and special events, TimeOut already has the name recognition and market presence to break into the ticket-buying sector. However, while they currently have the technical ability to do so (and have been selling tickets since 2016), they are not effectively recognized as a key ticket seller.
The Proposal
We decided to propose a last minute ticket buying and selling app that lets fans buy tickets to a show from either other fans who can no longer go or venues who have surplus tickets they would like to sell.
My role
UX Consultant | UX Designer
Constraints
2 week design sprint, including all research and design work.
BUSINESS RESEARCH
The Problem
There are so many events that are happening in New York City. Event-related businesses tend to lose money when they don’t sell out their events, and ticket-holders who can’t attend an event find it difficult to resell and recoup the cost. Additionally, consumers have very limited options to get tickets to an event last-minute.
How might we connect fans who want to get tickets to events last-minute with businesses who have leftover tickets and other people who can no longer go to events they have tickets for?
Business Model Canvas
To gain a deeper understanding of our client’s business structure, we performed a business model canvas.
TimeOut New York
Key Takeaways:
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TimeOut started as a content distributor and through the years has developed their business model to cover a much wider spectrum, including selling tickets, opening food markets, and expanding their digital platforms
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They are mostly focused on providing information and recommendations to people so they can take advantage of their cities
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They believe in the growth of local businesses
Competitive Matrix
We created a competitive matrix to help us discover the true value of what TimeOut brings to people and how it behaves comparison to its competitors.
Key Takeaways:
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TimeOut New York exists under its umbrella company, TimeOut Group. Together, TimeOut has both a global and local experience by being part of a big community spanning the world but still focusing on single cities through their location-specific entities.
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There are not many local companies doing both discovery and selling of tickets as their core activity; they usually focus only on one thing.
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TimeOut combines many different features that are available in the industry: selling tickets, special offers, discovery, and original content.
Feature Analysis
We performed a competitive and comparative feature analysis to understand the different features and additions TimeOut has compared to its competitors (companies that directly compete for users/customers), as well as several comparators (businesses that do not directly compete but have a similar business model).
Competitors: Village Voice, I Heart NY, Broadway.com
Comparators: Seamless, Amazon, National Geographic
Click here to view our full analysis.
Key Takeaways:
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TimeOut is up to date with all of the industries expected guidelines such as the ability to purchase tickets from the website, having a newsletter, a filtering feature, discounts, and more.
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They have been expanding and adding many features and new things into their digital product over the last few years, including a ticket purchasing platform in 2016.
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Keeping up with new technologies and with social trends is important for the company.
USER RESEARCH
Screener Survey
We conducted a screener survey to look for people that were part of the events industry: ticket-buying attendees or resellers, or just people that love to make the most out of the city. We received 24 responses.
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Click here to see our survey.
User Interviews
From our screener survey we developed a list of potential people to interview to get more information about our initial assumptions regarding the ticket-buying and event-going experience. We prepared relevant questions and conducted a series of five interviews.
To synthesize our data, we created an affinity map to discover trends amongst our interviewees and develop key insights.
Key takeaways:
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Personal interests influence on the person's decision to go to an event
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Events are a social endeavor, people tend to rely on their friends to know about them or attending at all
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Usually missing an event is caused by a sudden or unexpected situation.
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There is no reliable place or way to resell tickets
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The context of the event (where it is, about the artist) is something relevant at the time of buying a ticket
Personas
We created a primary and secondary personas to focus our design efforts and to ensure that our design ideas were consistent with users’ goals, needs, and pain points.
Our primary persona, Rebecca, decides to go to events last minute.
Our secondary persona, Simon, plans ahead and often manages getting tickets for a large group of friends.
DESIGN PHASE
Ideation
Given our time constraints, we decided to focus our efforts on the “fan to fan” ticket selling mechanic, which we dubbed “Phase 1.” Basing our design ideas upon Rebecca’s needs, we drew our initial solutions from our user research.
Design Studio
We developed our app ideas by running a design studio, where we all each sketched our own ideas for each part and shared them with each other. Then, we sketched another round of ideas where we took what we liked best from our teammates to converge on a final idea. Finally, we consolidated our ideas into final low-fidelity sketches for each screen.
Our combined hand-drawn wireframes from our design studio
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
We created our first digital wireframes as black-and-white, mid-fidelity screens from which we built an initial prototype using InVision. We ran our first round of usability tests using this mid-fi prototype, which allowed us to refine our ideas as we moved to high-fidelity mockups.
A sampling of our mid-fidelity wireframes. Some features were changed for our final prototype based on usability testing (see below).
Usability Testing
We performed our first round of usability testing with five users, providing them with three scenarios and associated tasks to complete through the app.
Synthesizing feedback from our tests, we noticed an important trend: our users didn’t fully understand the actual purpose of our app! While the usability tasks were completed relatively easily, zero of five users understood at the outset that the app was for reselling tickets by users to other users at the last minute. Two of five realized part way through the testing, while the other three never realized it at all.
To solve this, we developed the following ideas:
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Add introduction screen with explanation during first-time user experience
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Only offer tickets within 48 hours of the event
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Add a message from the seller on the ticket info screen to strengthen the connection between fans
We ran another round of usability tests with five testers on our high-fidelity prototype and met with great success: the problem of users recognizing our app’s purpose was solved, much to the delight of our testers.
“I love that you don’t feel like you’re getting ripped off by scalpers, like on StubHub or Ticketmaster.”
-Usability Tester
Additionally, our task completion times were just as fast as our initial tests, while our direct path completion rate rose to 100% for all three tasks.
Sitemap
We created a Sitemap representing the final app structure of Phase 1 of our designs.
Sitemap of our final design for Phase 1. Click to enlarge.
User/Task Flows
We created Task Flow to demonstrate the "happy path" a user can take to find, buy, and retrieve tickets to an event, as well as a User Flow to show the various possible ways a user can buy tickets and interact with our app.
Our User and Task Flows for our app. Click either image to enlarge.
THE VALUE ADD
User Journey Map
We created a User Journey Map to demonstrate how Rebecca, our primary persona, might use TimeOut Tix-In in the scenario of a surprise visit from her best friend.
Value Proposition
Key value adds for TimeOut New York include:
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Revenue via ticket sale service fees
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Traffic driven to TimeOut’s regular ticket-selling platform
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Recognition of TimeOut as a hub for tickets both first-run and resold from other users, potentially at a discount
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that TimeOut can use to measure success:
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Total number of tickets sold
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Tickets resold by users
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Tickets sold by Businesses/Venues
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Number of tickets bought elsewhere added to the app
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Percentage of tickets bought elsewhere successfully resold
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Tickets sold within:
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48 hours of event
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24 hours of event
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12 hours of event
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2 hours of event
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High-Fidelity Prototype
Note: Unfortunately, due to InVision's closing as of January 1, 2025, a live prototype is no longer available. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Next Steps
After completing Phase 1 of our app design (“fan to fan” ticket vending), our next steps would include:
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Building, prototyping, and testing the reselling feature for users
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Incorporate Business entities so they can add surplus tickets to the app to sell
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Allowing users to onboard tickets purchased elsewhere for resale
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Integrate all features into the existing website ticket selling platform