Designing for Disappointment
Replacement tickets
Introduction
At the end of 2019, the StubHub analytics team noticed a drop in conversion. The root of the problem stemmed from a lack of inventory, the perfect tickets that the customer had decided to buy were sold out before they were able to check out.
Opportunity
Show alternative tickets to the user when their first choice tickets sold before they were able to purchase.
Timeline
December 2019
Role
Design Lead
Team
Product Manager
Front End Engineers
UX Researcher
UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM
What is the goal? What is the opportunity?
IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM
Through analytics, we noticed that there were problems where users would select a ticket and by the time they got through the checkout flow, the ticket was gone. This was bound to happen because it was a marketplace, but we noticed a trend where it started happening too often.
MAP THE EXPERIENCE
Where is the user in the journey? How are they feeling?
This problem was focused around the very end of the buy funnel. In order to better understand where the user had come from, I mapped out the experience from the beginning. This helped highlight what a huge bummer it was when the tickets couldn’t actually be purchased. I knew from previously conducted research that customers are very well informed and spend a lot of time doing research before committing to buy.
DESIGN THE INTERFACE
Where does this fit? What does it look like?
One value prop that StubHub leans into a lot is Never Sold Out. So rather than show that the tickets they wanted weren’t available, I wanted to highlight that even though they didn’t get their first choice, there were still tickets that were similar available. This sucks no matter what so I realized there were a couple key points.
BUILD! SHIP! LEARN!
How do we validate? What did we learn?
The APIs that we were using were slow, meaning at some point the user was going to have to wait, either