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Solved usability issues with PDF tickets

UniversityTickets’ print-at-home tickets were designed for efficient validation scanning, using redundancy and easy readability, to provide a superior on-campus event experience for attendees.

SUMMARY

Solved readability and usability issues with print-at-home PDF tickets to decrease time required to scan tickets and seat guests—while maintaining features like custom-branding and custom content and accounting for edge cases.

Solution Preview

Problem

Low scan rate due to ticket scanning line not moving fast enough.

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Research

At an event using UniversityTickets’ devices and tickets, I conducted contextual observation of clients scanning tickets and customers handling their tickets.

Attendees were folding tickets in quarters or in thirds. This was causing creases to be placed in the barcodes due to where they were placed. These creases made it difficult for the scanners to read the barcodes.

Sometimes attendees would even hold out a ticket for scanning and cover the barcode with their thumb without noticing they were doing so.

A few tickets were misprinted in such a way that the bottom quarter of the ticket didn’t print or the ink on the right half was smudged so much as to make the barcode un-scannable.

Sometimes I stepped in to assist with scanning a few tickets and noticed that when I wanted to great a customer by name that it was difficult to quickly locate that information at a glance.

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Analysis

Primary Issues

Barcodes couldn’t be read by scanners

Holding Customer's were holding tickets in such a way that the barcode was obscured.

Folding

Mis-Printing

Water Smudging

Key information was difficult to quickly locate on the tickets visually

Difficult to find customer's name Quickly finding the customer's name is important for greeting them at the door.

Event name and category were difficult to distinguish Attendees need to know that they are bringing the correct tickets with them to the event.

Seat location did not stand out visually Important so staff and customer can easily locate their correct seat.

Holding - Barcode Covered

Original (not designed by Leo)

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Mis-Printing - Barcode Distorted

Original (not designed by Leo)

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Folding - Barcode Distorted

Original (not designed by Leo)

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Water Smudging - Barcode Distorted

Original (not designed by Leo)

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Ideation

Increased Barcode Redundancy Created draft layouts with 3 QR barcodes that avoided common fold lines

Improved Information Hierarchy Better structured the key information of seat location, ticket type, ticket number, and customer name so that it was easy to find

Integrated Team Feedback Removed map to make room for more client content and reduced info boxes to two key points

Tested with Real Data Discovered that ticket option and ticket type name content areas needed to be enlarged

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Vision

Goals for my design.

Better event branding Automatically show client's primary brand color or event's category color and include an event image

Increase redundancy Add multiple barcodes and barcode data in strategic locations

Encourage party ticket distribution Add instructions to users for each person in their group to be holding their own ticket

Elevate important information Make finding customer name, seating information, and event details easier

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Design

Old Ticket

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First Concept

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Final Concept

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Solution

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Fold lines shown in red

I provided specifications for the heights of each section of the ticket as well as graphical assets to the developer.

Information Hierarchy Fixed

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Scanning Issues Fixed

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Old Ticket

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New Ticket

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Results

15% increase in tickets scanned! The number of tickets scanned has increased 15% as a result of the improvements made to reduce scan errors and improve scanning efficiency.

In-use by 200 Universities across US and Canada! This new E-Ticket is now being used by over 200 colleges and universities across the US and Canada, including MIT.

Tickets Scanned

New Design 69% Scanned

Old Design 54% Scanned

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Takeaways

Observing users interacting with products in-context can lead to discovering big, unknown problems.

When a digital object/file (PDF) becomes a physical object in the real world (paper ticket) unforeseen problems arise.

Design for the extremes; not an ideal scenario. Plan for users to enter a much larger amount of content in the space provided and decide how you will accommodate for that.

Leverage existing data to inform design decisions. By analyzing the longest and average text lengths for text content I was able to design a ticket that would work better for most clients.

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Future

Areas for future exploration.

Alternate Layouts

I would like to add alternate layout options that clients can choose from, to offer more flexibility. A quarter-folded layout that looks like a mini book is something I’d like to explore.

Research Unique Needs of 4 Main Client Types

I would research the different E-Ticket needs of the four main client types: theater, student activities, athletics, and graduations. Perhaps offering an E-Ticket layout tailored to the needs of each would be better than a single layout balancing the needs of all four.

Additional Analysis

For additional measures of success I would have liked to compare two events at the same school of equal size using the original and the new e-ticket designs. I would compare the amount of time a user spends in line, user satisfaction with ease of finding their seat, and number of times a scanner's laser is activated vs number of times a barcode is successfully scanned.

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COMPANY

UniversityTickets was a live-event box office software solution for schools to sell tickets to on-campus events; before being acquired by AudienceView in 2019.

PROBLEM

Poor event experience due to long time in scanning line caused by multiple issues with barcodes and hard to find seating information on PDF tickets.

OUTCOME

15% average increase in tickets scanned for events

TOOLS

OmniGraffle

DELIVERABLES

User research, Wireframes

TASKS

User Research, Redesign of print material

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