The seat designer is a rich interactive web based seat map and ticket creation management tool. It enables Eventbrite organizers to design and manage their own seat maps, set a selling order, create and assign tickets for any reserved seating events they host. The project aims to open up and disrupt the reserved seating event market by enabling organizers to take control of their own seated events.

The seat designer compliments our existing event creation product by allowing the addition of a seat map to an event where attendees are assigned a seat when purchasing a ticket.

Intro video: http://vimeo.com/87748221

Until now there hasn't been an elegant and simple way of creating and managing reserved seating events in a self service fashion. Reserved seating events allow event organizers to optimise revenue with tiered ticket pricing whilst providing attendees with a better event experience through selecting their own seat at the time of purchase.

Reserved seating solutions until now were expensive, hard to use, visually uninspired and simply out of reach for many event organizers. Eventbrite now offers a product that is free to use (if the event is free) or charges a small fee when tickets are sold to paid events. Reserved seating was traditionally in the realms of Ticketmaster and Ticketek and other fee for service companies. The team at Eventbrite set out to create a browser based, on brand, visually lead design tool that enables seat map creation in a self service fashion.

The project faced many challenges not only from a solution design perspective, great care had to be given to ensuring it was as simple to use as possible for millions of potential users.

Technically the project was very challenging and pushes the boundaries of javascript and vector graphics browser based applications and is very forward focussed.

Our intent was to create a disruptive element within the reserved seating event space, where there is a distinct lack of options for event organizers who have a need for reserved seating products. Creating a solution based on a self service model enables us to target a large base of organizers who aren’t currently being serviced, as well as lure organizers using other providers by offering a more flexible, lower cost and simple to use product.

From a design and user experience perspective our goal was to make the software an extension of the Eventbrite brand and embody aspects of our visual and voice identities. This meant it had to be simple and fun to use, bright and engaging, supportive and nurturing. Simply put our seat maps had to be sexy and distinctly Eventbrite - seen on their own there had to be no mistake as to where they originated.

Another major consideration was accepting the fact that computer based drawing tools aren't for everyone, this presented inherent cognitive challenges for certain types of users. With this in mind we had to incorporate solutions and features to support less savvy or technically literate users. Features were developed to avoid the necessity of creating new seat maps from scratch. All seat maps created are linked to a venue and can be reused by the same organizer and shared with other organizers using the same venue. Additionally the user can quickly generate a layout by using the quick start wizard feature.

Prior to launching our reserved seating solution a lot of thought and analysis went into why Eventbrite should launch into this space to ensure it made sense for our core product and business. Once a need was established within the larger market and in our existing base of organizers Eventbrite set out developing a solution. A key gap was identified with our existing product where users would mature to a point of needing greater flexibility in how they sell their tickets and start hosting events at larger venues with fixed seating arrangements. Reluctantly our organizers had to look elsewhere for a solution when they became more successful and started hosting larger more complex events.

A team of experts was brought together to solve this problem, the team comprised of product managers and engineers with decades of experience at other ticketing companies as well a core design team of UX and visual designers.

Many hours were spent talking to organizers, venue managers and internal sales and customer support individuals to uncover truths, insights and to develop a deep empathy into the problem space.

During research a fundamental characteristic was found that simplified our target audience profile, this was... in a reserved seating world seats are either fixed (bolted) to the ground or flexible (stacked, moved, positioned as needed). When considering every conceivable type of venue, this simplified concept made the design task much simpler to execute.

Once a set of requirements was established the design team lead by UX ran a series of collaborative sessions with stakeholders. The aim of the sessions included unpacking the problem space via a constraints free mind mapping exercise, discussion was had around the requirements and goals, once themes were established focus was given to these. Next up, time was allocated to sketching out ideas and concepts so they could be presented back to the team for discussion. At the end of the ideation sessions a set of guiding product and UX principles were created and the strongest concepts identified and flagged for interactive prototyping.

One of the biggest challenges was establishing an appropriate interaction design approach. Early on we were undecided about how advanced the tool needed to be and how much functionality we needed to support. So we did a round of testing where we asked participants to design a seat map (based on a paper based equivalent) in both Keynote and Adobe Fireworks and observed the challenges and issues of working with these different interaction models. The testing clearly illustrated that an overly simplified approach like Keynote was the best way forward. As our prototype went through its rounds of iteration we tested regularly to ensure the UI and visual design was finding the right balance between being visually elegant, approachable and as simple to use as possible.

Like any complex project our MVP launched in March and was a big first step in bringing the seat designer to market, a solid roadmap remains for future releases.

The Eventbrite reserved seating product aims to further democratize the event ticketing industry and level the playing field amongst providers in this space. Reserved seating is now something organizers of all walks of life can utilize and afford to use. Gone are prohibitive contractual arrangements and expensive fees for simple seat map changes. Creating a self service aspect will shake up other companies business models and force a rethink of service fees with like product offerings.

Since launch (a little over a month) take up rates have been amazing, better than expected - what’s equally more impressive is seeing how our users adapt the product to meet their needs. At no point during our ideation and research phases did we see our product being used to sell allotments to artists for a sidewalk chalk art festival or as a seat selector for a bus coach service between Dallas and Houston. These unexpected use cases bring much delight and joy to the team and further illustrate the power of enabling the long tail, a segment of event organizers who Eventbrite has built its business around.

In fact if our reserved seating product was a country of its own it would almost be number 5 in gross ticket sales compared to other countries (after 30 days). We only expect to see bigger and better things as we build this platform out by adding features for more specific use cases and becoming relevant and useful to more and more organizers globally.