Beyond the Seat: Testing What Sells the Experience
The Context
SeatGeek is a live event ticketing platform that works both sides of the market. We have primary clients, teams and venues who sell directly through our technology, plus a secondary marketplace where fans buy and resell tickets from each other.
By 2025, this project sat inside “Sell the Experience,” one of SeatGeek's company-wide priorities. My core stakeholders were a Lead Designer, a Product Manager, and a Lead Data Analyst. Rightsholders had spent years investing in better premium experiences, but fans never saw any of that investment at the moment they actually decided what to buy. This project set out to close that gap.
The stakes were real. Consumer spend on “experiences” had grown +65% between 2019 and 2023, and rightsholders had announced $15B+ in venue investment and renovations, much of it new premium seating types. But fans had no way to know what any of those seat types actually meant or felt like. A club seat, a loge, and a suite all looked identical in a shopping flow built around price and location alone. The team had spent quarters A/B testing individual ideas against that gap without much to show for it, so instead of testing our way there, we pivoted to build a research-backed product vision the team could work backward from.
From Sideline to Head Coach
Research's role shifted from validating ideas after the fact to setting product vision from the start. Before any user interviews, the team ran a competitive audit of experience-selling e-commerce sites, PM-led desk research, and a data dive from our analyst. We kept this deliberately hands-on for the whole team, so everyone built shared conviction together instead of reading a report later. That work produced five guiding principles:
Rapid Research
Secondary research and the data dive told us what was happening: premium inventory growing, spend on experiences rising. What they couldn't tell us was why fans weren't shopping for it, and we needed to see and hear fans react to real concepts, fast, before committing to a direction. So after the desk research and quant, we ran rapid, lightweight rounds of concept testing instead of one long study. Three rounds, each small enough to build on what we'd just learned: R1 moderated with 10 participants, R2 moderated with 8, and R3 unmoderated with 7. That way, findings from one round could reshape the concepts we showed in the next, instead of waiting months for a single verdict.
Qualitative reactions alone would have told us fans liked the idea of richer seat content, but not which pieces actually mattered enough to build. So we added a Kano-style survey question after every concept each participant saw, a quick structured rating of how they'd feel with versus without that feature. That gave us a quant layer on top of small-sample qual, and let us plot every concept on a 2×2 of Attractive, Performant, Indifferent, and Must-be, so we could separate the ideas fans loved from the ones they merely tolerated.
Hypotheses
Before talking to a single fan, the audit, desk research, and data dive let us write down what we actually believed, so the concept tests would have something concrete to prove or break:
What the Research Told Us
The Kano scores and concept-test sessions converged on the same few statements, and each one pointed straight at a shippable idea:
Working Together
Instead of asking the team to sit back and listen to a readout, I had the Lead Designer lead the competitive audit and the PM lead the desk research themselves, alongside our data analyst's data dive, so nobody got the findings secondhand. It's the same idea as Bloom's taxonomy in a classroom. People internalize and commit to an idea when they're the ones evaluating and creating it, not just receiving it.
That carried into the concept-testing rounds too. We ran regular working sessions with the Lead Designer and PM to watch fan reactions together, debate what the Kano results meant for scope, and turn findings into shippable bets as a team, instead of a research report handed off at the end.
The Artifact
Experiential Shopping surfaces richer visuals directly in the browse and map flow; the listing page brings each seat's real perks to life before checkout.
Shipped Results
Three levers, all shipped and measured.