StubHub Queue

For high-volume ticket sales.

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Case Study

As a combination UX Designer, Visual Designer and Content Strategist, I created a flow for StubHub's very first "waiting room."

StubHub has been recently journeying into the realm of "primary ticket sales," meaning, sale of tickets directly through StubHub and not a third-party seller. That meant we needed to create a line for when tickets were in high demand for major events, such as the boxing match shown above. We would also need a page to show ticket buyers when the site itself was experiencing overload during a high-volume sale.

Business Needs

The business didn't know how to design a good virtual line, but they knew what they wanted from the perspective of selling tickets. After initial project kickoffs and some early scrums, I summed up the business angle as:

Create an easy-to-navigate, fully automated queue for customers.

Oh...and make sure they don't leave!

In other words, product management wanted to build a system that would keep people moving through the system without discouraging them from sticking around. We wanted to make sure that customers would stay on StubHub and not close the window or try other sites.

Competitive Analysis

I looked at three sites to see what other famous (or infamous) waiting rooms were out there:

BURNING MAN

If you've been living under a rock and don't know, Burning Man is the largest art/music/camping festival in the United States and takes place in the Black Rock Desert every Fall season. Each year the festival grows in size by thousands of people, which means tickets are in demand more and more. 

As a result, the Burning Man staff work to improve the online ticketing system every year and streamline the process. I took a look at some past versions of their waiting room and made notes on what I liked and disliked.

In the "likes" column: 

• Each variation of the waiting room had a time stamp to reassure you the page was refreshing correctly. 
• Later versions added a box for staff to write custom messages to communicate directly to users.
• The best feature was the ability to minimize or close the window without losing your place in line.

Dislikes:

• The waiting room gave no indication of where you were in the grand scheme of things. Am I #50 out of 200? Or more like 19,999 out of 20,000?
• The messaging was unclear as to next steps. If I close the window, how will I know when it's my turn in line? And how much time will I have to buy a ticket if I make it to the front? 

TICKETMASTER

Ticketmaster doesn't have a waiting room per se, but they do have several screens with timers, urgent warnings and site timeout messaging.

Likes:

• A very easy-to-read ticker that counts down the days/hours/minutes 'til you can get your ticket.
• Calls to action besides just waiting around, to give people a reason to stay on the site. 

Dislikes:

• Their site stall-out page offered no suggestion of how long a redirect would take.
• Some of the calls to action didn't make sense - such as creating an account, which I felt is not what many people would do while waiting for a ticket. 

BEST BUY

I recalled that a lot of online retailers also had their own waiting rooms for high volume products, and found Best Buy's most recent queue screens.

Likes:

• Useful text that tells you exactly what's going on and what to expect next.
• A status bar / percentage combo that makes it clear where you stand in line.

Dislikes:

• A jarring visual design containing boxes with and without shadows, bold and capitalized fonts in multiple sizes, and a strange combination of colors: red, yellow, blue, black and two shades of grey. The style is obviously branded Best Buy, but the choices of color and shading seemed arbitrary.

User Flow

Early Sketches

Site Map

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