STUBHUB INTERNSHIP
Summer 2021
overview
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StubHub is an online ticket exchange company where people buy and sell tickets for sports, concerts, and other live events. Some of the ongoing problems in StubHub’s seller experience are high amount of Customer Support calls and high payment failure rate. During my internship, I was given the task to dig down to the root of such problems through research and offer design recommendations.
project type
UX research, web design
duration
3 months
team
Xavier Lian | design manager
Sophia Tang | senior designer
Eric Dong | project manager
Constraint
No third-party plugins
Lack of user behavioral data
Limited engineering resources
what was the problem we were trying to solve?
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How might we help the sellers receive their money in a fast, easy, and reliable way?
what were my responsibilities?
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🔎 Identify user pain points and usability issues
1. Conduct competitive analysis to learn gaps and opportunities.
2. Evaluate the usability of current key seller flows.
3. Analyze current seller payout flows and seller journeys.
📊 Synthesize research for opportunities with cross-functional teams
1. Synthesize research findings into high-level insights.
2. Identify design opportunities with cross-functional partners
👩🏻💻 Ideate and prototype design recommendations
1. Ideated possible design solutions for addressing seller pain points
2. Prototyped low and high-fidelity designs
problems on the surface
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The story begins with a meeting between the design team and a product manager. In the meeting, he mentioned some ongoing problems in StubHub’s seller experiences. Those problems were very general, like high amounts of Customer Support calls. He wants the design team to do some research and come up with potential design solutions.
🤭 Basically, this is what happened:
“It is one of StubHub’s core responsibilities to ensure sellers get their money on time, yet today we receive lots of complaints on failed payout delivery. ☹︎”
research methods
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To dig down to the root of these problems and potentially solve them, I started doing research to learn the current user flow.
#1 - Competitive Analysis & Flow analysis
To understand gaps and opportunities between StubHub and other similar C2B2C products in regards to seller experience, I conducted a holistic competitive analysis of both direct and indirect competitors, learning their business strategies, taking screenshots of their flows, and comparing them closely to StubHub’s.
Competitor Mapping
Screenshots analysis of Viagogo
#2 - Heuristic Evaluations
To perform heuristic evaluation, I walked through StubHub’s existing seller-related flows and documented areas that violate known heuristics, such as the Nielsen Norman usability heuristics and industry-specific conventions, for sellers to complete tasks. Tasks include: listing a ticket, setting up payout accounts, editing payout accounts.
Together with my mentor, we ranked the usability issues by severity and summarized the findings into a digestible chart together with design recommendations to share with cross-functional teams.
So, what went wrong?
Identifying gaps on current user journey
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The research allowed me to understand what sellers’ current experience is like to receive a failed payout. I mapped the pain points onto the journey map to build connections between different stages of interactions and identify the root problems.
key pain points & opportunities
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INSIGHT#1: The intransparent payout process causes user confusion
StubHub’s current design hides necessary information on proper payout account set-up Sellers have to learn from their failure. We want to increase transparency so that sellers are informed and able to complete the payout set-up easily.
INSIGHT#2: Little communication on account troubleshooting
StubHub does not provide appropriate feedback on payout account status. It is very difficult for users to understand when and how to fix their accounts. We want to use effective communications and offer help in context right at the moment for users to do account trouble-shooting.
INSIGHT#3: Inconsistency and misuse of design elements
Inconsistent UX writings and violations of design conventions create moments of frictions for sellers to smoothly set up and manage their payout accounts. We aim to redesign current design components for an overall frictionless seller experience.
Ok, problems identified. Time to brainstorm ideas.
ideation - addressing the pain points holistically
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With the design principles in mind, I brainstormed potential improvements on two main flows - Ticket Listing and MyAccount. I sketched my ideas and received feedback from designers, engineers, and product managers.
scoping down
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After showing my ideations with the team, I scoped down the project based on current business focus and available resources. The new task will be to redesign the MyAccount/Settings page, which is the key after-sale touchpoint for payout account set-up and management.
As-is Design: StubHub Payout account page
Bring ideas to life.
low-fi design iterations
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Based on the feedback I received from my team and users, I iterated my design. For the 2nd low-fi design, I focused on making the design more scalable, improving the UX writing, and changing the indicator design options.
1st iteration
key design features
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next step
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Need A/B testings to prove how the new payout design works. Sample data that we could look at:
Test account failure rate
Test contact rate decreases
Ease-of-use rating for payout account management
Test listing completion rate
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to create metrics to track and monitor seller behaviors
So far the design decisions are iterated based on heuristic evaluations and internal feedbacks, such as technical difficulty and business strategies, rather than seller behavior metrics.
💜 my takeaways
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Getting and giving feedback
One of the most valuable lessons I learned this summer was that getting diverse perspectives on my designs is crucial to revealing blind spots and unlocking possibilities. Sometimes when my cross-functional partners provided conflicting feedback it was challenging to find a balance and bring my designs to an agreement, but I learned to understand and empathize with their positions. A product manager might advocate for designs that align more closely with the product roadmap while an engineer might prefer designs that can be implemented effectively. Understanding different internal goals and trying to bridge the gap was a fun challenge.
Embracing the uncertainty
Throughout my internship, I was constantly faced with ambiguity and was expected to rescope my project based on my team's needs. Because there were so many moving parts, I had to adapt to changes quickly, learn to be comfortable with not knowing, and keep an open mind while setting realistic expectations and priorities to push my project forward.
final thoughts
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Embracing the uncertainty
My summer at StubHub reaffirmed my passion for design. I realized how extremely lucky I was to be able to do something I love as my job and to learn from amazing mentors who exemplified the kind of designer and teammate I want to be.
My amazing team 🎖 - we had a good meal that day by the way
My side project - design new hire swag! I enjoyed it a lot :)