Ticketmaster's SweetSpot
An AI-powered seat-finding tool that aims to help users quickly find the best seats based on price, view, and preferences, addressing the frustration of overwhelming seat maps and limited filtering options.
The company
Ticketmaster is a leading online ticketing platform that allows users to discover, purchase, and manage tickets for live events such as concerts, sports games, and theater shows. It partners directly with artists, venues, and promoters to handle ticket sales, digital ticket delivery, and entry management at events.
The problem
While the platform succeeds at getting tickets into users’ hands, research indicates there are opportunities to improve how users plan, engage with, and return to Ticketmaster beyond the initial purchase flow. This creates space for a new feature that enhances the overall user experience while remaining consistent with Ticketmaster’s established brand identity.
Research objectives
I spoke with 6 users to understand how they discover, select, and purchase tickets for live events. By exploring users recent experiences, challenges, and expectations, we aim to uncover pain points in the current ticket-buying journey and identify opportunities to improve usability, transparency, and trust.
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Understand the end-to-end ticket purchasing journey, including how users discover events, select tickets, and complete checkout.
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Identify factors influencing platform choice, such as trust, convenience, pricing transparency, or prior experience.
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Evaluate user perceptions of pricing, fees, and value, and how these impact satisfaction or purchase abandonment.
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Uncover key pain points and friction in the buying process, including seat selection, checkout, and payment.
Key insights
After conducting research aligned with these objectives, I synthesized the data into key insights that highlight users’ core challenges, motivations, and opportunities for design.
Most common platform
Nearly all respondents mentioned Ticketmaster as their primary purchase channel, often because that’s where the official event link directed them.
Pricing &
fees
100% of respondents complained about high or unexpected fees, describing them as frustrating, unfair, or confusing.
Abandoned purchases
Roughly 83% of respondents admitted they had abandoned a ticket purchase, almost always due to fees, high prices, or lack of trust in the process.
Key
frustrations
High/hidden fees
Resellers/bots buying tickets too quickly
Stressful queues and uncertain wait times
Difficulty finding desired seats
Checkout process
Generally seen as functional or “fine,” but some found delivery options confusing.
Discovery channels
People most often heard about ticket sales via social media or from friends.
Personas
The personas were created by grouping shared behaviors and challenges uncovered in my interviews.
The interview insights revealed multiple pain points within the Ticketmaster experience. Given the project constraints, I focused on a single area of opportunity: reducing friction in seat selection and checkout. From here, I begin to form short, open-ended questions to reframe insights from research into actionable starting points for ideation.
How might we...
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help users quickly find seats that match their preferences (e.g., price, view, accessibility)?
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reduce friction when switching between seat maps, pricing details, and checkout?
Ideation
By reframing user pain points into How Might We questions, I was able to identify clear areas for innovation. This led into the ideation phase, where I explored ways to make finding the best ticket more intuitive, personalized, and enjoyable.
SweetSpot user flow
Early designs
From these initial ideas, I translated key concepts into low-fidelity wireframes to quickly visualize structure, layout, and user flow before refining the design further.
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Branding
App feature: SweetSpot
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Name & value: SweetSpot clearly communicates the core benefit—instantly identifying the best seat where price, view, and availability intersect, positioning the feature as a helpful shortcut rather than another filter.
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Visual language: The pulsing target icon symbolizes precision and active optimization, subtly signaling that AI is working in real time to surface the optimal choice without overwhelming the user.
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Brand fit: The name, icon, and motion were designed to feel native to Ticketmaster’s existing visual system, using simple geometry and restrained animation to ensure consistency across app icons, web buttons, and seat maps.
The MVP
SweetSpot
From these questions emerged the idea for a conversational, guided seat-finding experience designed to help users quickly identify seats that match their needs without navigating overwhelming seat maps and filters.
Usability test
Objective
Evaluate how easily users can interact with SweetSpot to find desirable tickets, understand its purpose, and assess whether it improves the overall seat selection experience.
Results
Overall, users found SweetSpot to be a clever and promising feature with strong appeal. The main challenges center on discoverability, clarity of functionality, and contextual usefulness. With refinements, SweetSpot has the potential to become a trusted assistant that simplifies the seat selection process across different types of events.
100%
of users responded positively to the name describing it as “clever” and intuitive once understood.
4/5
users indicated they could see themselves using SweetSpot, especially for casual browsing or when prioritizing seat quality over speed.
100%
agreed that the idea of an AI assistant for seat-finding could reduce friction in the ticket search process.
Iterations and refinements
Despite the overall positive reaction, testing helped identify opportunities for improvement:
Suggested improvements for entry point
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The target icon was not immediately obvious as the way to launch SweetSpot
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Placement made it easy to miss
Editing and manual input
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Users struggled to imagine how the experience would work if they needed to edit preferences (e.g., changing budget or seat view).
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There was no clear path for manually entering answers if none of the AI’s suggested options applied.
Takeaways
As a longtime concert lover and frequent Ticketmaster customer, choosing Ticketmaster for this add-a-feature project was intentional. I’ve personally experienced the friction and frustration that can come with buying tickets, and through research I confirmed that those pain points are widely shared by other users.
Designing SweetSpot allowed me to channel both my firsthand perspective and user insights into a feature that meaningfully reduces friction. I’m proud of the solution I developed and believe it has real potential to add value to the Ticketmaster experience.