When an industry-wide legal change all but eliminated the effectiveness of Gametime’s most valuable sharing feature, we went on the hunt to discover a low-cost solution.
Role
UX, Research, Strategy
Timeframe
2022
Tools
Figma, Usertesting.com
Team
Design, Product, Eng
Platform
iOS app
Context
A little background
What is Gametime?
Gametime is a secondary marketplace in the ticketing industry; it competes with SeatGeek, Ticketmaster, and StubHub etc.
What is the Gametime Ticket Dealer?
The Gametime Ticket Deal allowed a user to send purchased tickets to friends. To access the ticket, the friend would have to download the Gametime App.
The problem: the Ticket Dealer is toast
An industry-wide change all but eliminated the Ticket Dealer. Due to this change, Gametime users could no longer access or share certain tickets on the Gametime app. (They had to go to Ticketmaster, the primary inventory holder in most cases, to get a hold of their tickets.)
But why is that a problem?
Because the ticker dealer was Gametime’s most important organic sharing channel.
Our goals
📲 Increase organic sharing to acquire new users to the app
⏰ Keep the ticket purchasing process fast and easy.
💸 This is an MVP. Be resourceful, be economical.
User Research
Where are Gametime users interacting with non-users?
We conducted 8 user interviews + 10 user tests. We focused on the purchase process of a user who is buying tickets for a group.
Research Goal: Find the existing interaction points.
The Findings:
There are 4 interaction points between users and non-users:
Pre-Purchase (via SMS) to poll opinions for ticket selection
Post-purchase (via SMS) to confirm purchase and send seat info
Via a payment platform to collect money for tickets
Via social media to post about the Game
Users took (and sent) a lot of screenshots during the user journey
Research Synthesis and Ideation
4 interaction points ➡️ 5 good ideas
The user journey map allowed us to visualize where users were interacting with non-users. This led to 5 promising ideas.
The 5 Ideas
We used the User Journey and competitive analysis to ideate!
Ticket voting feature
Post purchase promo code with financial incentive
Post purchase Venmo integration
Post purchase Google Calendar integration
Post pics of event on social media
Side Quest!!
What’s up with Screenshots?
We felt curious about screenshots for two reasons…
Screenshots came up a lot during user interviews.
SeatGeek had released a screenshot sharing feature. When a user took a screenshot they were prompted to share SeatGeek along with the screenshot.
Are Gametime users taking screenshots?
Yes. About 16% of our users took screenshots during the purchase flow.
Where? Most screenshots (60%+) were taken on the Order Confirmation page.
Why did users screenshot the OC page?
Answer: To invite their friends to the event.
We went back through the user research to look for answer. Our users took OC page screenshots because they wanted to send that screenshot to the group chat in order to:
share event info (date, time, location)
communicate that the tickets have been purchased
receive confirmation of attendance from guests
The 6th idea: We could help users officially invite their friends (sans screenshot)
We realized that the screenshot of the OC page effectively served as an Invitation/RSVP…
What if we enabled our user to send RSVPs to their guests? We could repurpose the existing ticket dealer feature but instead of sending an actual ticket, we’d send information about the ticket and an invitation to the event.
A new sticky was added to the pile.
Side Quest over.
Effort Impact Matrix
Which idea will optimize user sharing without breaking the bank?
All 6 ideas were contrasted and compared.
How we measured impact:
Which idea would result in the most sharing of the app?
Which idea would result in the most engagement on the recipient side?
How we measured effort:
What idea will cost us the least resources (engineering, etc)?
Why did the Invite/RSVP Idea win?
Minimal effort: Once we realized we could re-use the old Ticket Dealer to allow users send RSVPs (instead of tickets) to friends, it was a no-brainer. The RSVP feature would need very little engineering or design work to implement.
High potential impact:
Users were already sending screenshots to invite guests, so we anticipated they'd be interested in a feature to support this.
Friend engagement could be high since responding to RSVPs is a standard and polite social norm.
The RSVP occurs post-purchase, so it wouldn’t impact conversion or delay the purchase process.
The MVP
The Flows
1️⃣ Gametime user sends an invite
The user purchases tickets and is directed to the “RSVP Dealer” to send RSVPs.
2️⃣ User’s guest receives an invite
The guest receives an invite via sms. The guest must download the Gametime app to RSVP to the event.
UI updates (UX stayed the same)
The Transition
Ticket Page ➡️ RSVP Page
We made two edits to transform the guest’s ticket page into an RSVP page with event info:
The action banner notifies the guest that they have successfully RSVPed.
The disclosure informs the friend that this is an invite and not a ticket. “This is not your ticket.”
Ticket Dealer ➡️ RSVP Dealer
We changed the copy of the ticket dealer so instead of sending tickets the user was prompted to send invites.
The Prototype
Sending a RSVP
The Results
A data cliff 📈
Gametime’s post-purchase share rate jumped from 6% to 24%.
Reflections
The power of a social norm
The act of inviting a guest to an event or accepting a RSVP is tied to social commitment and creates a sense of accountability and encourages users to follow through. I believe that by mirroring real-life social norms, we were able to effect engagement and conversion.
Next Steps
I’d like to track the friend engagement (app downloads) and purchases. I’d be interested in running a test where we offer the friend a promo code, for use on a first time purchase, once they have downloaded the app.