Opportunity

Over 50% of StubHub visitors accessed the site via mobile devices and numbers were increasing dramatically. The company knew that mobile users would surpass desktop users by the end of 2014. With desktop conversion rates coming in much higher than mobile web, a new, responsive experience across all devices would serve all customers regardless of device.

This experience would emphasize discovery and social—instead of placing an exclusive focus on transactions. The experience would be highly personalized, local, and would also launch internationally. 

Role

Helped drive discovery work, research, provided overall design direction

Goals

  • Drive engagement

  • Drive shares

  • Improve conversion rates on mobile

 

Process

We performed discovery work using the customer experience map and the storyboard to determine our vision and create high-level concepts. 

Our guiding design principles helped to keep us on track:

  • Design simplicity (mobile first)

  • Flexible & scalable

  • End-to-end customer journey—not features

  • Personalized user experience

  • Emphasize the social aspect of events

  • Delight fans

Together, we determined minimum viable experience (MVE) and started with 3 project tracks to run experiments for the homepage, event page, and checkout. From there, we tested specific versions with a small percentage of the traffic to learn and ideate. 

 

Home page

Artist pages

Dark theme and light theme explorations

Results

The initial release outcomes were positive.

Homepage:
Conversion saw a 3% lift in the initial release to a small percentage traffic (but this release did not contain all features from the existing mweb experience). The same design approach on the native site yielded a 7.7% lift in conversion. 

Checkout 
Conversion saw a 6% lift in the initial release to a small percentage of traffic. The UX team also completed a UI only release where changes in the visual design contributed approximately a 2% lift in conversion. The experience was being implemented incrementally; therefore, key features were missing that would eventually push conversion higher when feature parity is achieved.