Success Story 3: These Tickets Sell Themselves (or Do They?)

For this Success Story, we're going back almost to the beginning of time... World Wide Web time, that is.  

It's 1997.  Internet use is exploding; dot-coms are booming.  It's an exciting and revolutionary time.  For tried-and-true products like books, flowers, and movie tickets, customers are breaking centuries-old shopping habits and choosing to buy online.

Situation

One place, though, isn't feeling it.  Those selling tickets for the New York City Ballet are baffled.  (Storyteller's Note: Since 15+ years have passed, I'm gong to use the venue's name.)  Through conventional channels, their tickets practically sell themselves.  The ticket office and phone lines are besieged by requests.  But their site selling tickets on-line isn't doing well at all.

This is not what they hoped for when they launched their site a year earlier.   They wanted an efficient, automated sales vehicle so their staff could be free to do other things.  They came to Interactive Media Associates, where I worked at the time, for help.

Approach

We researched the situation thoroughly.  We looked at the existing website; we examined its technical infrastructure, especially its interface with ticket fulfillment; we learned all about the ballet performances and how they're marketed.  We hoped to talk to end users, but in such a specialty market that wasn't practical, so we interviewed those in ticket sales who dealt with customers and understood how they shopped.

Insights

After an intensive study of ticketing, we reported our findings:

  • The tickets, in turns out, did not sell themselves.  Customers spent a great deal of time asking questions of the sales people before they decided what to purchase.
  • Specifically, customers wanted to know: What else is on the program for that night?  Who's going to be dancing -- who are the principals?  Who are the choreographers of the performances?  What's the ballet about?  Is this ballet ever performed with a certain other ballet?
  • None of those needs, it turned out, were met on the current website.  Only if you already knew exactly what you wanted did it work for you.  Everyone else needed a human for help.  
  • The site was ugly and off-brand.  Ballet evokes exquisite beauty; the website felt like a cardboard box.  (In fairness, elegant graphic designs were just starting to appear on the Internet.  But as soon as they did, the old pedestrian sites were immediately obsolete.)
  • Finally, the Ticket Fulfillment Center had to take the raw data provided by the site and manually enter it into their ticketing system.  More work for them.  Small wonder, then, that they weren't promoting the site.

Action

We dove in and overhauled the site completely.

  • We built an information architecture and content model that allowed users to shop in all of the ways they already shopped.  This involved a lot of careful work with relational databases and content groups.
  • We made a page design that was branded, reflected the elegance of the venue, and performed to the standards of the artists themselves.
  • For ticket fulfillment, we had to delay automation of the data transfer until after the first site release, but we began building the system it so fulfillment could be automated in a Phase 2.  It was, and now we had the ticket office among our allies.

Results

Every so often you have not just a success, but one that exceeds your wildest expectations.

Ticket sales in the calendar year after launch increased twenty-fold -- two thousand percent.

Ah, but perhaps you say: Wait a minute -- everything was exploding in 1997-1998.  True -- it was a great year for on-line sales growth.  The industry average was 300 percent in 1998 over 1997.   But ours increased 2,000 percent -- over six times the average.  How did we get all of that extra growth?

It's simple: We made it easy for customers to find the tickets that sell themselves.

 

 

 

 

For this project, the following assets were created.  For samples, contact me.

  • Heuristic Analysis
  • Research Protocols
  • Research recommendations
  • Functional Prototype in reusable HTML
  • Visual Design
  • Business Rules -- display logic and data (relational database)