The Live Experience Journey
The Context
SeatGeek is a live event ticketing platform that works both sides of the market: primary clients — teams and venues like the Cowboys and AT&T Stadium — who sell directly through SeatGeek's technology, and a secondary marketplace where fans buy and resell tickets from each other.
This project sat at the very start of a brand-new initiative. There was no UX director yet, no designers, and no roadmap — just me, a principal PM, and an engineering manager trying to figure out what to build first. In the post-COVID boom in live event attendance, we needed to understand what was actually going through fans' minds once they had a ticket in hand: from planning, to attending, to the days after, what were people doing, thinking, and feeling that we could tap into with a one-of-a-kind product experience?
The Study
A two-phase mixed-methods study (Jan–March 2022): desk research and quantitative segmentation, followed by 27 fan interviews, a 9-person diary study, 12 guerrilla intercepts at a live Nets game, and 11 client and staff interviews across BSE, AT&T Stadium, and SeatGeek staff.
The Artifact
Four Themes
Part of preparing for the event is making sure everyone actually has their ticket — especially when a group is arriving at different times. This is where Parties (ticket sharing via a link) came from: for clients, more individually scanned tickets means more individual fan data, not just one buyer's.
Fans consistently lit up at the idea of a deal — half ranked a seat upgrade as their single favorite potential feature. That appetite is what became Seat Upgrades: a way to sell a better experience after the ticket is already bought.
Exit logistics turned out to be the one part of the night nobody had solved — rideshare chaos and long waits colored fans' very last memory of the event. Concourse Maps ended up addressing part of this too, highlighting which gate to enter and exit from based on a fan's seat, plus rideshare and parking locations.
Fans wanted answers — where's the merch stand, how do I get to my section, is there a shorter line — without leaving the moment they were in. That's the fan-facing case for Concourse Maps: SeatGeek already had the venue data, it just wasn't reachable.
From Insights to Opportunities
Throughout the study, I ran bi-weekly working sessions with my two core stakeholders — the principal PM and engineering manager — to review incoming insights together, analyze patterns as a team, and brainstorm what we could actually build in response. The opportunities mapped onto the journey below came directly out of those sessions, not a solo research readout.
Reading the Map
Hover a row to see what it's actually showing.
3 New Product Lines
The journey map informed a 3-year roadmap for SeatGeek's Fandom team, with three product lines spinning directly off its findings.
The problem: groups buying tickets together had no way to split access — one person held every ticket, and everyone else relied on screenshots or trust to actually get in.
Host buys tickets and sends one invite link; guests claim individual access while the host keeps control. Refined across 3 rounds of usability testing: V1 was hidden under the barcode widget (low discoverability) → V2 tested Send vs. Share entry points → V3 refined guest management.
The problem: fans who wanted a better seat after buying had no path to get one — upgrading meant starting over on a whole new purchase, if they even knew it was possible.
A post-purchase upgrade offered via a Rally widget on the ticket. Fans said they'd pay 50–75% more for a meaningful upgrade; the MVP validated appetite but was capped by narrow eligibility and limited widget visibility.
The problem: once inside, fans had no way to see what the venue actually offered — food, merch, bathrooms, club access — beyond wandering and asking staff.
Personalized, navigable venue maps in Rally. Launched publicly with the Cleveland Cavaliers at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, January 2025.
Impact
This research directly informed a 3-year roadmap for SeatGeek's Fandom (day-of-event) team, giving three separate product teams a shared, evidence-backed starting point instead of three disconnected bets.