Ticket Battle is an application for the sales of tickets to cultural events such as concerts and plays. It provides great deals in the form of flash sales to users who want to attend an event at the last minute.
This case study is part of a LINC research initiative focusing on interface design. Cases dealt with are fictional services co-created with the participants of the Data & Design workshops. The solutions considered here are not intended to be recommendations to copy, but rather contextual illustrations of creative processes that might inspire your services and products. The study does not cover the entire user experience, but simply concentrates on key points. As such, it does not necessarily cover all GDPR requirements.
Product’s Context
Ticket Battle is designed to facilitate last-minute sales of tickets to cultural events at competitive prices. The ticket sale concept is based on a race against the clock to fill in an order form as quickly as possible. The form consists of a minimal number of fields to be completed in order to reserve tickets: user’s surname, first name and email. The time each user takes to complete the form is recorded and compared with times taken by other users interested in the same seat (and who have also completed the form). The fastest is the one who wins the tickets.
Sur les sites d’e-commerce, le tunnel d’achat est souvent considéré comme un moment
On ecommerce websites, the shopping tunnel is often regarded as critical to customer relations as it is what enables transactions to be finalised. It is also the process during which users have to communicate a certain amount of personal information in order to be able to finalise their purchases. As shopping tunnels are generally designed to be particularly quick to navigate by focusing only on what is necessary to complete the transaction, all too often only secondary importance is accorded to provision of information on data protection, as it is considered incidental to the act of purchase. Faced with this paradox, how can we imagine the user experience of a service when ordering a product to ensure that people are fully informed about the use of their personal data as well as on their rights?
User pathway and key steps
L’équipe de Ticket Battle s’est attaquée au problème en envisageant un parcours scindé en deux temps. Ainsi, la première partie du parcours utilisateur correspond à la mise en concurrence des places. La seconde partie du parcours, correspondant à l’acte d’achat, est activée seulement si l’utThe Ticket Battle team tackled the problem by envisaging a user experience split into two parts. The first part corresponds to the ticket competition itself while the second corresponds to the actual purchase and is only activated for the winning user.
This break with the traditional silo of the shopping tunnel enables communication of information on personal data to be handled differently. Among other things, participants suggested:
- creating a specific information step between seat selection and form completion. By providing information upstream of the pathway’s most stressful step, participants sought to make sure that users understood how their data were used;
- ensuring a follow-up of information provided to users by using emails as a means of communicating further information and grouping together all means enabling users to keep control over their data (e.g. exercise their rights).
From seat selection to form completion
During the workshop, the participants decided to develop the user experience for a new user discovering the platform. She is therefore not familiar with how it works and needs to be informed about it.
Although participants’ initial idea was to send the user directly to the order form, they finally decided to display the “rules of the game” between the seat selection step and the step in which the user had to enter her personal information into the form as quickly as possible. The rules not only provide information on the mechanism for obtaining seats, but also on the way in which personal data are processed.
Proposed Approach
Email: a user-relations medium in its own right
En vue du fonctionnement asynchrone du service et de la possibilité d’utiliser Ticket Battle The service’s asynchronous operation and the possibility of using Ticket Battle without a user account make email the medium of choice for exchanges between service and user. Emails are sent at several points along the user pathway: to confirm submission of the form, communicate results of the “ticket race” and confirm ticket purchases.
After giving thought to ways of enabling users to find information on their personal data easily, participants decided to use the emails sent after the form had been completed, to remind users of key information on processing, direct them to the privacy policy and tell them how to exercise their rights, incorporating such information into explanations on the follow-up to the purchasing pathway.
Proposed Approach
The last part of the email was designed to include all key information that users can access without delay in order to know what is done with their data, exercise their rights or configure their marketing preferences.
Limitations
Le fonctionnement asynchrone de Ticket Battle en fait un cas bien particulier dans le domaine de la vente en ligne. Dans ce contexte, et comme le démontre la proposition des participants, il est relativement aisé et surtout nécessaire de penser une information relative aux données personnelles distribuée tout au long du parcours utilisateur. Dans le cas de parcours d’achat plus classiques et directs, c’est-à-dire sans délais entre le moment Ticket Battle’s asynchronous operation sets it apart in the field of online sales. In this context, as the participants’ proposal demonstrates, it is relatively easy – and above all necessary – to provide information on personal data all along the user experience. In more classical and direct purchasing procedures, i.e. with no break between expression of the wish to purchase and the act of purchase itself, such mechanisms need to be adapted in order to integrate the user experience. In this case, the question arises of including a “moment of calm” in the shopping tunnel so that the user can take the time to read and inform themselves without feeling pressured by time.
This proposal only took legal aspects to do with the GDPR into account, although other legal obligations may also apply. In the case of a service like Ticket Battle, which could well be regarded as a “game contest”, obligations relating to the Consumer Code may also have to be complied with.