William VanderVeen | Ticketmaster: Artist & Venue Detail Pages (iOS)

Making search better by surfacing more useful information

The Artist Detail Page (ADP) and Venue Detail Page (VDP) bring all relevant information on these topics to the forefront. Before the introduction of these features, details for artists and venues were nearly impossible to find, buried under far too many screens in the Ticketmaster app. Now presented alongside search, users have easy access to this information. I was fully responsible for these features’ designs including UX and UI.

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Business/UX challenge

There is useful information about artists and venues in the Ticketmaster iOS app that is difficult to access.

Bring this information to the surface (business challenge) without having it distract from the overall experience of using the app (UX challenge).

Team members, roles

Me - lead product designer
Chris Stroud - lead developer
Brandon Houlihan - design manager

Tools used

Sketch, Principle, After Effects

Timeline

Three months

What kind of useful information?

Artist biographies, artist set lists from previous shows, venue addresses and phone numbers, instructions on where to park, and how to take public transportation to venues.

Unfortunately, this information is buried. It can only be accessed by navigating through several other screens in the app.

Screenshots of all the screens one needs to navigate through to find information on artists and venues

My role

As lead product designer, I was responsible for figuring out the best place to surface this information as well as designing all aspects of how it would look.

I worked closely with the lead iOS developer to address technical feasibility, and with our project manager to ensure the proposed relocation of this information was “upfront” enough.

Approach

In order to successfully relocate the artist and venue information, I needed to understand the structure of the Ticketmaster app, where this information was currently located, and where the most useful place to surface this information would be.

I began by examining the existing user journeys to access this information.

User journeys required to access artist and venue information

Approach: Learnings

Artist biographies are buried under five screens. Artist set lists from previous shows are buried under six screens (one more after the artist biography).

Venue addresses, phone numbers, instructions on where to park, and how to take public transportation to venues are also buried under five screens.

Approach: Learnings

While it is possible to search for artists in the Ticketmaster app, it is not possible to search for venues.

If a user wanted to see venue information, they would first have to search for an artist, find an event associated with that artist, and then view the information associated with that event (which includes venue information).

Where to put this information?

After some initial brainstorming, I determined that the best “page” for this information wouldn’t be a page at all.

Instead, it would exist on half a page, where users could just push it away with the swipe of a finger.

I’m talking about the Search Results page.

Screenshot of old Search Results page with an arrow pointing to where the artist and venue information should go

Screenshot of newly designed artist detail page, located at the top of the Search Results page

Screenshot of newly designed Artist Detail Page, scrolled

Don’t let it distract

The Search Results page offered the best solution for surfacing artist and venue information because it allowed for the presentation of this information within the context of searching for an artist or event.

And even if it isn’t, because this info is presented in concert with search results, users can easily ignore or swipe up to get this information to go away.

Enhanced search

And, in enhancing search to include venues, my team and I were able to give users the ability to search for and find venue information directly as well.

Screenshot of newly designed Venue Detail Page, also located at the top of the Search Results page

Exploring different possible layouts of Artist Detail Page

User journeys for Artist and Venue Detail Pages, which significantly reduce the amount of screens required to access artist and venue information

Successful merging of code, lack of comprehensive vision

Final designs were successfully translated into code and merged into Ticketmaster’s master branch despite questions concerning technical compatibility.

However, the time allotted for integrating the new designs did not include deprecating the original screens displaying artist and venue information.

Reflections, possible next steps

The ADP/VDP project, while promising in its efforts to support users in context, never addressed whether this information was appropriate, or what other types of information could exist in the app.

Moving forward, a broader inquiry into other types of information would need to be made in order to fully understand how to support users searching for events.

Final designs for Artist and Venue Detail Pages