By Peter Ramsey

23 May 23

Ticketmaster: the UX of a true monopoly Company Logo
Ticketmaster12 min read
Listen

Ticketmaster: the UX of a true monopoly

Ticketmaster: the UX of a true monopoly Featured Image

Ticketmaster, who merged with Live Nation in 2010, control more than 70% of the ticketing market. In short; they’re a monopoly.

And they’re often accused of abusing their power with high fees, being slow to react to bots and scalpers, and providing a service that routinely crashes during popular releases.

But let's ignore all of that, and go one level deeper.

Ticketmaster, as it stands today, is an experience where:

  • 🤖

    The onboarding is optimised for data collection
  • 👊

    The checkout punishes cautious consumers
  • 🐞

    The core product is ripe with errors

And yet, their analytics likely hide all of this, behind (presumably) strong attempted-conversion rates and low churn.

Get ready to pass GO!

Case study

Please rotate your device to view this slideshow

Note, this won’t work if ‘rotate: lock’ is on in your device settings.
465214
465215
465216
465217
465218
465219
465220
465221
465222
465223
465224
465225
465226
465227
465228
465229
465230
465231
465232
465233
465234
465235
465236
465237
465238
465239
465240
465241
465242
465243
465244
465245
465246
465247
465248
465249
465250
465251
465252
465253
465254
465255
465256
465257
465258
465259
465260
465261
465262
465263
465264
465265
465266
465267
465268
465269
465270
465271
465272
465273
465274
465275
465276
465277
465278
465279
465280
465281
465282
465283
465284
465285
465286
465287
465288
465289
465290
465291
465292
465293
465294
465295
465296
465297
465298
465299
465300
465301
465302
465303
465304
465305
465306
465307
465308
465309
465310
465311
465312
465313
465314
465315
465316
465317
465318
465319
465320
465321

👇

That’s all for the slideshow, but there’s more content and key takeaways below.

Slide 1 of 109

Key UX takeaways

1. Front-loading permissions

When you stop and think about it, it's weird that even the most popular apps in the world front-load their experiences with multiple requests for your data.

This is true, despite the universal understanding that consumers tend to hate it.

It's a form of 😮‍💨 Cognitive Dissonance that has become so common, we've stopped noticing it.

For example, before you can even browse any events on the Ticketmaster App, you need to navigate through all of the following requests:

  • Sharing data across other companies and apps
  • Accepting Ticketmaster's privacy notice
  • Onboarding welcome screens
  • Notification permissions
  • Location tracking permissions

Often when I challenge companies on this, they'll claim that "it allows us to deliver the best experience to the user, once they're using the app", before conceding.

There are exceptions, where permissions can meaningfully impact the value proposition (i.e., an app to track you cycling outdoors would be severely hindered without location data), but these are exceptions to the rule.

It feels like an under-utilised UX hack: the better experience is to ask for permission in context of a clear benefit.

Instead of asking the user for everything right away, wait until you can demonstrate a clear value for that 'thing'. Wait for the 'why?' to be obvious.

⚡️

Notifications

If the user lands on a sold out event, offer to notify them if any tickets become available.

🗺

Location sharing

If the user searches for a new location, offer to always and automatically show nearby events.

As a super rough demonstration, something like this could work:

Notifications

Notifications

Location sharing

Location sharing

To be clear, it's not necessarily about improving the number of people who opt-in, but rather giving people an informed choice, where they don't feel pestered.

It can feel like a hack, because it quickly reduces friction in the onboarding.

2. Second-order effects

Product builders; please don't copy Ticketmaster—there's a real possibility that even they don't know how bad this experience is.

Or rather; they could be looking at the data, and concluding that everything is great.

This is because Ticketmaster has an unusual dynamic: popular tickets are released with plenty of promotion, far more demand than will ever be satisfied, and people are desperate.

In other words; they will put up with just about anything.

For example, imagine that you're scrambling to secure tickets to this theatre show, do you even stop to register how awkward it is to tap the seats that you want

Or are you operating on pure autonomy and panic?

null image

This one factor alone warps a typical user's behaviour, and will skew almost all of the checkout analytics that they collect.

If companies insist on operating solely on data-driven decisions, they'll miss even the most obvious annoyances.

And as a second-order effect, if you assume that Ticketmaster's success is in part due to their design, (or at least not hindered by it), then you'll be missing the point too.

3. Fail with grace

14 million people (including bots) tried to purchase Taylor Swift tickets on their release. The catch; there were only 2.4 million for sale.

In a post-mortem of the crash, Ticketmaster claimed that they’ve received 3.5 billion system requests, and published the following graphic. 

I expect that the problem was exacerbated by people panic-refreshing multiple devices.

null image

Individual services (both internal and external APIs) start to slow, and then stop.

For example, their postcode lookup service died, stopping people from validating their addresses, which therefore lost them their tickets.

But if we ignore these intense 'unprecedented demand' moments (where bugs are supersized), I still quickly found repeatable steps that crashed more or less every time. 

For example; finding a ticket, cancelling the order, and going back in the browser.

null image

I can be even more reductive, by using one of the most common errors: the 404.

My non-technical summary is that a 404 error refers to a missing piece of content. For example, an old case study that you still have the link for, but has since been removed.

Internet companies have learned that a well-designed 404 error is a 'catch-all' for missing content, and the small amount of effort required to create a helpful one, demonstrates empathy and attention to detail.

Compare Ticketmaster's to Airbnb's below:

Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster

Airbnb

Airbnb

Ticketmaster's 404, which you can hit by going here, is a non-responsive page that was probably never signed-off by a designer. Functionally it's flawed too, as the 'return to previous page' CTA won't even work for new sessions (because there's no previous page to return to).

It's not the worst part of their user experience, but it is an indication that the 20 billion dollar company has their eye off the ball.

Study Complete

That was an easy way to consume 50 hours of UX research, right?

What will you dive into next?

Why users are ignoring your features

Why users are ignoring your features

Simple techniques to increase feature usage, retention and ultimately alter how users perceive the value of your product.

Hiding complexity to create effortless onboarding

Hiding complexity to create effortless onboarding

The techniques that Slack have used to create an effortless onboarding flow, and why you might not want to copy them.

The secrets of a $7.08 welcome bonus

The secrets of a $7.08 welcome bonus

The product psychology behind why Robinhood offer new users $7.08 of free stock, and not $10.

All of the UX analysis on Built for Mars is original, and was researched and written by me, Peter Ramsey.

Never miss the free UX analysis

Free case studies, the moment they’re released, plus a digest of the best UX Bites every few weeks.