Feature Integration: Fandango and Live Events

Learning to integrate a new feature into an existing product.

The Task: Fandango wants to expand its offerings to live events. They want to integrate a feature into their existing mobile app to allow users to search for and buy tickets to live events, and then use their mobile device as a ticket.

1. Research

To begin, we made some initial assumptions and developed an initial problem statement.

Assumptions
▸ Movie lovers also want to go to live events.
▸ People think live events are bigger scale and
more expensive.
▸ People tend to go to movies/shows with friends
▸ Buying tickets isn’t hard, but splitting is a pain
Problem Assumptions

Initial Problem Statement:

How might we integrate a shopping and
redemption process for live event tickets within
the Fandango App?

To validate our problem statement, we first released a screener survey in order to ensure we drew interviewees from a pool of people who already purchase tickets to live events in some way. From the results we found 6 people with whom we conducted in depth user interviews. Our questions covered the following primary topics:

▸ Why buying tickets online / What kind of events / With Whom
▸ Feelings about the buying process
▸ Past experience of using the tickets
▸ Ideal live event experiences
▸ Primary conditions to buy tickets

From our interviews, we created an affinity map to discover important trends. These trends led to some key “I” statements that led us to create two user personas from which we could base our designs.

Kyla, our primary persona

Andrew, our secondary persona

Using these personas and our research together, we revised our initial problem statement:

How might we integrate live event ticket
sales and redemption features that are
“shareable” within the existing Fandango
App?

2. Feature Prioritization

First, we had to determine which of the many features ideas

3. Design Studio

To begin our designs, our team of 3 ran a design studio to develop our ideas. We ran 7 rounds of design studio, developing our ideas individually, pitching them to the rest of the team, and then combining them to arrive at a final design idea. These 7 rounds yielded our initial designs and user flow through our new integrated feature.

With these screens drawn by hand, we were ready to make our first digital mid-fi wireframe.

4. Mid-fi digital design

Using Sketch, we converted our hand-drawn lo-fi wireframes to mid-fi black-and-white digital wireframes. Then, uploading our Sketches to InVision, we created a clickable prototype with which we could run usability tests.

To begin our designs, our team of 3 ran a design studio to develop our ideas. We ran 7 rounds of design studio, developing our ideas individually, pitching them to the rest of the team, and then combining them to arrive at a final design idea. These 7 rounds yielded our initial designs and user flow through our new integrated feature.

Some samples of our mid-fi wireframes

5. Usability Testing — Round 1

We conducted 5 usability tests to test our mid-fi prototype user flow and comprehension. We asked our users to complete 3 tasks based on scenarios:

1. Open the Fandango App and search for concerts in your area on September 12, 2018.
2. Reserve the cheapest tickets for Katy Perry for September 12th, and send your friend’s ticket to them to pay separately.
3. Open the Fandango App, and access your tickets for Katy Perry.

Our results yielded the following insights:

1. Users had trouble finding the calendar icon.
2. Users wanted to click “calendar” and “location” in either order (and usually calendar first).
3. Users were confused at the seat selection screen.
4. Users were confused at the “charge me” vs. “release ticket” options.
5. Users weren’t sure what happened to the third ticket, and wanted to share a ticket after paying for it.

In addressing these insights, we upgraded our designs to high fidelity, color screens.

6. Hi-fi Screens

We made adjustments to our prototype and colorized it with the Fandango color scheme. After these improvements, we ran a second round of Usability Tests. Our tests gave us suggestions for future improvements, along with a few features we couldn’t include in our MVP.

• Iterate again on our most recent designs.
• Detailed seating chart, allowing users to pick seats directly.
• See the View from your Seat before purchasing.
• Pop-up and/or Push Notifications when an outstanding picture has been paid for.
• Integration with Venmo or Paypal for payment options.

Our final prototype can be found here: https://invis.io/QHNWHE67DJV

7. Final Reflections

The process of feature integration is an interesting mix of business needs and user-provided research. Of central importance wasn’t simply coming up with the right design, but it was also validating the business goal of the company in the first place. While still advocating for the user, it is important to be able to say to the company stakeholders that their idea will not work. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case for us — in fact, users expressed a strong desire for what the client wanted to develop. In the end, my team and I felt like we developed a great product that users and stakeholders alike would be excited about.