Redefining Discovery: A Diary Study on How Fans Decide
The Context
SeatGeek's Demand team owns the part of the funnel before a fan ever reaches checkout: the browsing, comparing, and deciding that happens across days or weeks. My stakeholders were the Demand team's product and design leads.
Not every fan shops the same way, and honestly, that's what made this fun. Some know exactly what they want and buy in minutes. Others browse with no real plan and rarely convert. But the group we cared most about was the Evaluator: fans who research prices and dates, gather group preferences, and revisit the site several times before they're confident enough to buy. They hesitate over price volatility, group coordination, and simply not knowing if now is the right time. Every visit we failed to convert into confidence was a fan we risked losing to a competitor, or to procrastination entirely. Winning that hesitation over, even a little, meant real incremental revenue we weren't capturing.
Secondary Research, Then a Diary Study
I started with secondary research: a review of our own past Discovery and Shop studies, plus outside consumer reports on shopper types. That gave us a working theory of who the Evaluator was, but a theory built entirely from old data and other people's research wasn't enough to act on with confidence.
Evaluators don't make their decision in a single sitting, they circle back over days or weeks, so a one-time interview would only capture whatever a fan remembered after the fact. Instead, I ran a 3-week diary study with 20 fans who attend live events fairly often, having them document their real discovery and shopping behavior as it happened. That gave us the actual moments of hesitation, comparison, and waiting, not a tidy recollection of them.
The Artifact
The one-pager stakeholders actually kept open during planning, alongside the journey map that grounds it in real fan types.
People don't come to SeatGeek to discover what they want to see, they come to us already knowing that. What they're discovering is dates, prices, and availability. Five principles came out of that reframe, each with an honest scorecard of how well we were already doing and a concrete product opportunity attached:
- Make waiting productive — most fans don't convert on their first visit, and group coordination is the biggest reason they wait; points toward group shopping tools and smarter return nudges.
- Add delight with personalization — fans want to feel like we know their preferences, not just their purchase history; points toward personalizing city, event, and listing pages, not just CRM emails.
- Add content without adding complexity — fans leave our flow to look up parking, neighborhood, or set lists elsewhere; points toward bringing know-before-you-go content into pages we already have.
- Simplify comparison shopping — fans compare events and listings, but our cross-event tool barely converts; points toward map mode as the real answer for comparing listings at a glance.
- Trust lives in the transparent details — fans still aren't fully confident buying resale despite existing trust badges; points toward clearer explanations right where a fan is deciding.
What We Found
The diary entries mapped cleanly onto four phases: Spark, Research, Consider, and Decision, with a Waiting to Buy stretch in between that could last days or weeks. A few real reactions stuck with me:
Working Together
Once the diary data was in, I ran a five-part workshop series with the Demand team's product and design leads, one session per guiding principle. Each session went deep on the principle itself, walked through the diary study evidence behind it, and ended with the group prioritizing opportunities together against real business impact, things like conversion, cart abandonment, and return visits. That shared prioritization, session by session, is what turned five principles into a backlog the team actually believed in.
From Principles to Roadmap
This work gave the Demand team a shared, evidence-backed vocabulary for what an Evaluator actually needs, and a stack-ranked opportunity list tied to conversion, retention, and brand differentiation. It also led to a company-wide priority: adding more content across SeatGeek wherever shoppers were lacking the context they needed to decide. Rollout of the resulting product bets is in progress.