How digital optimization could have prevented the Burning Man online ticket sale meltdown
Did you attempt to buy Burning Man tickets in this year’s online sale? Yikes! Tens of thousands of eager patrons, who had crafted lengthy ‘Burner profiles’ months prior, eagerly watched a rotating gif for up to four hours for a chance to buy tickets.
The event’s self-described “culture of possibility” did not translate into its digital presence, and in doing so missed an opportunity to create a seamless ticket sales experience for potential attendees and staff. Burning Man’s fearless and creative spirit could have been put into technical practice in the online ticket sale by using customer data from Burner profiles, testing user flow, and leveraging reusable site components.
The meltdown
Even after hours of waiting in the online queue, the customer ticket sales experience was an epic disaster. Many visitors were kicked out of the virtual queue, and admonished for digitally cheating when they had done nothing of the sort. When other visitors finally arrived at the page to buy tickets, the ‘pay’ button was hidden in the browser window. Incorrect and vague error messages were displayed when tickets were sold out, leaving visitors confused and angry.
Mashable described this year’s sale as a “frustrating and broken mess” in their detailed breakdown of the Burning Man 2019 ticket sale. I won’t re-hash everything here, but I definitely recommend checking out Mashable’s takedown of the sale for a complete re-cap.
Not only was this a frustrating and time consuming visitor experience, but most likely a terrible engineering emergency for the Burning Man staff. From answering upset and angry social media posts, to diagnosing the problem while visitors still attempted to purchase tickets, engineers must have been frantically battling digital fires.
Even if everything had gone according to plan, the online ticket sale would have been less than desirable. Buying tickets to high profile events like Coachella or Burning Man is a stressful process of refreshing your browser window in an attempt to be nanoseconds ahead of the tens of thousands of other visitors just like you trying to get a ticket.
If you are lucky enough to get into the ticket-buying portal, you have about 5 minutes to purchase tickets and a parking pass before your spot in line is lost. Stress!
This approach to ticket sales presents an issue of scalability. As demand for festivals and immersive experiences continues to grow, issues like this will only compound in severity during the ticket sales process. The current practice of an online queue mimics a physical box office, where the rule of ‘first come, first served’ apply.
The ‘box office’ model is not feasible for a virtual community of this caliber because servers overload and deliver terrible customer experiences. Frustrated customers lead to a loss of business, which means that the success of these events is actually hindered by their outdated ticket buying process.
In the interest of growing event interest and keeping current customers, Burning Man and other events alike must take some of their expertise in culturally creative leadership and apply it to their ticket sales via digital experimentation.
How Burning Man could benefit from digital experimentation
Predicting the most efficient and fair way to distribute tickets to this volume of visitors is a daunting and impossible task for any one person or team. The only way to discover the ideal solution is to leverage data from real customers who are interacting with the ticket sales process.
Burning Man has been iterating and experimenting with different methods of selling tickets over the years, including ticket lotteries, profiles, and queues. Now that there is record high site visitor count and experimentation tools are available, Burning Man can ensure a smooth and secure ticket sales experience for Burners as well as internal staff.
Burning Man could benefit from using digital optimization by:
- Successfully testing the ticket buying experience ahead of time and using feature toggles
- Giving fair ticket opportunities to a diverse group of visitors
- Seamlessly communicating with visitors during the sales process
Testing user flow & feature toggles
Some devastating technical issues that occurred during the Burning Man ticket sale could have been prevented by a successful QA process that utilized environments.
Users in this ticket sale were admonished for attempting to load the page in multiple windows, or for skipping the digital line when they had done nothing of the sort. Other users got a screen that the sale had not started yet, when in fact they had entered the sale at the correct time, hours prior. In some cases, the ‘pay’ button was hidden when the visitor actually got a chance to choose the tickets they wanted to purchase. After waiting hours in line, I can’t think of a more frustrating customer experience!
It takes effort, time and engineering resources to perform thorough quality assurance on a purchase flow. If the Burning Man staff did not have the time or dedicated engineering resources, I understand why this step in the process may have been difficult.
One way to perform successful quality assurance is to utilize staging and production environments. Staff members and engineers could mimic visitors and experience the ticket sale in a staging environment(version of the website designed for testing). Once the bugs in this environment were caught and fixed, the changes would be applied to the production environment(the version visitors will experience).
This process enables engineers to fix the incorrect logic of these error messages and faulty styling ahead of time, preventing real visitors from experiencing the frustration and time loss during the actual ticket sale.
Additionally, let’s talk about the error message(pictured above) admonishing site visitors when the ticket sale was already live. Even if this issue was not caught in the quality assurance process, someone on staff could have simply turned that error message off in a matter of seconds by using a feature toggle.
Feature toggles provide the unique capability to test, remove or change a portion of the site without risk to the rest of the user flow or site architecture. When staff were alerted that a faulty error message was displayed, they could have toggled that feature so it was no longer visible in the production environment. While that error message was turned off, it could have been corrected by engineers before being rolled out again correctly, all while the experiment was still running.
Giving equal opportunity to potential ticket holders
An ethos is stated on the Burning Man event page,
“Once a year, tens of thousands of people gather in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. In this crucible of creativity, all are welcome.”
Using visitor data to control ticket sales could add a component of fairness and balance to the event’s population that is not feasible in ‘real world’ cities, while simultaneously saving the site’s servers.
Let’s start by utilizing the information stored in everyone’s Burner Profiles, breaking the visitors into the following groups for example:
- Volunteers/Staff
- Theme Camp/Art Installation
- Burning Man Project
- Mutant Vehicle
- Published Media or Educational
- Return Burners
These groups can categorize Burners(people who participate in Burning Man) into visitor audiences, with each audience getting a separate ticket sales experience. Then the traffic could be split in order to a) save the site’s servers by breaking the ticket sale into different time slots and b) allocate a specific percentage of tickets to each audience to create a diverse and balanced experience.
Each Burner audience could have a different window of time in which they purchase a ticket. Volunteers could buy tickets on Wednesday, Theme Camp on Thursday, Published Media could buy tickets on Friday, etc. This would split the traffic into more manageable groups, which could mitigate the risk of the site breaking due to too much visitor traffic.
Beyond time slots, Burning Man staff could decide what percentage of tickets go to which audience in order to create an ideal experience when the event actually takes place. For example, if each audience gets 20% of tickets allocated to them, it could create a balanced demographic of ticket holders at the actual event. The staff could decide the optimal ratio of artists, volunteers, and published media, or even the ratio of newcomers to seasoned Burners.
Communicating with visitors
One of the biggest complaints about the online Burning Man ticket sale was the lack of transparency and communication during the process. Error messages from Burning Man were incorrect, and those who had waited literally hours in line had no idea what happened and what to expect next when they were in front of a never-ending spinning graphic or were kicked out of the queue completely.
If Burning Man had utilized pre-built reusable components, such as a pop-up or butter-bar, this issue could have been fixed quickly with minimal effort from staff(and minimal effort from engineers) during the sale. It is essential that these components are built out ahead of time so that staff can quickly add them in the case of an emergency.
A pop-up or banner(created ahead of time by developers or found pre-made in a Github library) could have been implemented with an experiment in minutes so that every Burner stuck in the endless sale would see an updated message about technical issues or learn that tickets were sold out. This would have mitigated frustration and saved many people hours of valuable time.
Wrapping Up
Digital experimentation is all about using customer data to mitigate the risk of technical failure, while building processes to optimize every user’s experience. Meltdowns, frustration and lack of communication during Burning Man’s online ticket sale could have been prevented with creativity and effort that was powered by digital experimentation.
Beyond fixing the pitfalls, testing and digital optimization efforts can enable Burning Man and other events alike to create a seamless and successful event and ticket sales experience.
Here are some additional resources on how to achieve the mentioned digital optimization methods using Optimizely:
