Case study
Eventbrite Organizer
Mobile event create
Two to one
Soon after joining Eventbrite in 2013, through the acquisition of Lanyrd, a small social events startup, and whilst waiting for my visa to move to the US, I was gathering empathy for the organizer side of the marketplace. I attended events to watch how the day-of piece of the event lifecycle would unfold, and vary wildly. I’d help check-in event attendees to understand how the disparate tools, on both desktop and mobile, highlighted pain points that wasted the organizer's valuable time, causing frustration and adding to their stress.
My first job, whilst still in the London office, and working ‘alongside’ a PM based in San Francisco, was to consolidate two apps into one—which turned out to be an incredibly enjoyable IA problem to solve. At the time there were two separate organizer apps, ‘At the Door’ and ‘Entry Manager’. At the door enabled organizers to sell tickets on the day of their event; Entry Manager enabled them to scan tickets, checking-in their attendees.
Consolidating the two was a no-brainer and, unbeknownst to me, became the foundation for an experience that I would revisit, and obsess about, over the next four years.
OG apps
At the door (l) and Entry Manager (r)
App merger IA
Event lifecycle
Fast forward to 2016. The ‘Organizer’ app had gone through multiple iterations. It had become a tool that was loved by organizers, serving their needs in managing their tickets and customers. At the time, the app catered to a small sliver of the event lifecycle. Desktop was still the default tool for much of the operational side of event and ticket creation. This wasn’t necessarily a problem. Sizable event organizers would have offices from which they would run and manage all aspects of their business, from the venue to their ticket sales. The day of the event would, in most cases, run relatively smoothly with the tools we offered. If a new ticket needed to be added, offering a discount to fill the venue, for example, meant the organizer would simply create a new ticket on their desktop, and see it appear in the app for their employees to sell. Not ideal. But not the worst.
The app catered for a small sliver of the event lifecycle
The customer
As we added more and more functionality, reacting to insights from our field research, Organizers referred to the app as addictive—one even calling it ‘crack cocaine for event organizers’! The reference was related to a simple sales dashboard that we had added that displayed the number and types of tickets sold. This allowed organizers to constantly check how their ticket sales were performing, on-the-go, without logging in to their desktop. This kind of insight, and many others like it, allowed us to cover more of the event lifecycle with the app.
We continued to research with organizers managing events of vast scale, all the way down to small meetups. We started to recognize that organizers were, in fact, increasingly on-the-go. They still used their office desktop but we saw the need for more than just data delivery, day-of sales and check in. We were capturing user stories that spoke to the need to create tickets on the fly and edit last-minute information about the event, all whilst on-the-go.
Dashboard, sell and check in
Edit event
At that point, the app was only available on iOS and we were receiving resounding requests for Android support. Providing devices for employees to check-in event attendees was expensive if iOS was the only option.
Based on the insights we were gathering from visiting and talking with organizers across the US, at the very minimum, simple edit and ticket creation seemed like a go-do. For a while I had felt that the app could be a superset of the desktop product, providing everything the organizer needed to create, manage and sell their event, whilst providing extra functionality only the app could offer—scanning tickets and accepting in-person sales.
With these learnings, and in my spare time, I prototyped an end-to-end flow showing how organizers could create, edit and share their event from their mobile device.
I tested the prototype with organizers and they were very excited about editing their event but were skeptical about event creation. Desktops, large screens and real keyboards were referenced as a must for creating events. I shared these learnings and the prototype with the then VP of product who responded with ‘why aren’t we doing this already?’.
Edit concept
Android
The prototype and test results got us buy-in to build out the entire app functionality, with edit, on Android. This was a double-win for our customers and, due to legacy code issues on iOS, meant that we were able to move incredibly fast, getting to parity by building from the ground up with an incredibly talented trio of engineers.
We were also able to make improvements to the UI based on feedback we had gathered via in-field tests, improving the sell view and check-in experience. We were able to act on feedback from venue owners that the bright white UI made for a tiring experience when in darker environments. This allowed us to systemize the color palette to bring dark and light modes to the product, designed by my incredible visual design partner, Lumen Bigott, and engineered in a way that created zero overhead with future feature additions.
Outperforming expectations
Adding edit functionality to the app required multiple design iterations and research. We needed to ensure that we were creating intuitive experiences that were not merely short-term solves but allowed for updates to functionality, always keeping in mind the possibility of expanding the app to allow event creation. The ambition to close the feature and event lifecycle gap remained in the back of our heads, throughout.
When released, the uptake of the Android version, along with engagement in the ability to edit event data was much greater than we had expected. The rise in editing event information and ticket creation, on-the-go, way out performed any projections we had conservatively set.
Adding edit expanded the app's use
Create concept prototypes
Prototype
With edit and ticket creation functionality in place, we effectively had the majority of the services needed to enable full mobile creation. This availability of services was predominantly down to the fact that web create was undergoing its own overhaul, adding structured content, allowing for a create once, publish everywhere approach to the product. Additionally, taking inspiration from the likes of Squarespace, with its intuitive drag and drop interfaces, web create was looking to simplify the form-based creation process that customers were forced to use.
With the use of Flinto and Principle, I prototyped and iterated on a native experience, looking to achieve the full creation process, on an inherently gesture-based device. I considered how structured content objects, gestural interactions and rich text editors could offer a delightful create experience. At that point, event creation had not given the customer the feeling that they were building an event page. With the prototype, I was able to closely emulate the page that our organizer’s customers would see, also offering the ability to preview the page that they would ultimately buy tickets from.
Prototype—sign-up to basic details
Add tickets
Add image
Drag to add, image
Ideal state
This ‘ideal state’ captured the essence of creation whilst offering a more tactile experience. Again, the prototype was received incredibly well by leadership and was prototyped by one of the Android engineers, the incredible Tom Insam. This quickly gathered momentum and we were able to realize a full, end-to-end create experience for our customers, powered by the amazing services that the web team had been tirelessly working on.
Again, our assumption going into this was that mobile event creation would appeal to the smaller scale event organizer. As I mentioned earlier, larger event organizers were skeptical about full mobile creation. Simple events, however, were the perfect target for quick, on-the-go creation for free and lower cost events. Our MVP proved us wrong. Our success metrics were met and exceeded, seeing engagement with event creation on mobile increase, month over month. The rapid iterations that the Android team were able to release saw a further uptick in mobile create. In hindsight, the expectation that customers have with mobile products, it seems obvious that closing the feature gap on mobile would yield positive results. At the time, though, this was a leap of faith that, thankfully, paid off.
Adding create allowed customers to do more on-the-go
Catering for more
With the addition of edit and, ultimately, create, the Organizer app allowed customer to effectively manage the majority of their events from their phone, whilst on-the-go. This was a huge win for Eventbrite and the organizer side of the marketplace, pushing the company to think mobile-first.
Shipped product demo
Award
Post release, the app was submitted to be considered for the Material Design Awards. In 2017, the year of the release, Eventbrite Organizer won the Interaction Design award. This small, agile team—one product manager, three engineers, myself as interaction designer and my visual design partner, worked tirelessly, delivering a product that customers loved and that I couldn’t be more proud to have been a part of.
Receiving the award from Matías Duarte
