The hard part was never selling the ticket. It was getting people through the gate
TicketNetwork teamed up with MLB and Ticketmaster Secure Render to launch a brand-new mobile ticket delivery experience. Buying the ticket? Smooth as butter. Everything after checkout? That's where it all fell apart. People kept losing track of their tickets, slammed into confusing authentication walls, and scrambled to pull up their barcodes right as they reached the gate.
I led design strategy and execution end-to-end, across web, mobile, email, and account surfaces. The mission: take a scattered, stitched-together post-purchase mess and turn it into one connected ecosystem that walks people confidently from "just bought it" to "I'm in."
💡Checkout was never the finish line. The real win was the moment someone walked through the gate. That single reframe changed absolutely everything about how we tackled the problem.
🎟️
Where are my tickets?
People expected their tickets the second they paid. Instead, extra hoops like account logins and Secure Render steps left them wondering where their tickets had actually gone.
🔐
Why do I need an account?
Plenty of folks had no clue an account was even part of the deal. The link between buying, signing in, and grabbing your tickets? Totally invisible in the old flow.
⏱️
Event-day pressure amplified everything
A tiny annoyance on the couch turns into a full-blown crisis when you're walking up to the stadium, stuck in line, and the gate is right there.
🗺️
Fragmented touchpoints
People pinballed between confirmation emails, account pages, password resets, and delivery instructions, forced to assemble a journey that should have just worked on its own.
02 · Discovery
It was never a retrieval problem. It was a connected-ecosystem problem
Before sketching a single screen, I mapped the entire customer journey from "add to cart" all the way to "through the turnstile," then teamed up with Marketing, Customer Service, Engineering, and the Ticketmaster integration crew to pinpoint exactly where the friction lived and what it was costing the business.
The problem was never just "finding the ticket." It was that we were asking people to navigate a maze of disconnected touchpoints at the single most stressful moment of the whole experience.
User journey audit: Existing flow, where friction piles up from purchase to entry
What cross-functional discovery revealed
📧
Marketing partnership
The confirmation email was broken onboarding
Teaming up with Marketing, I dug through the entire post-purchase comms flow. The confirmation email was usually the first place people looked after checkout, but it told them almost nothing useful: where their tickets lived, whether they needed an account, what to do on game day. Honestly, it was a receipt cosplaying as an onboarding experience.
Email auditCTA analysisExpectation mapping
Marketing partnership: Post-purchase confirmation email, the existing experience we put under the microscope
🎧
Customer service partnership
Real-world frustration patterns
Customer Service was answering the same questions on repeat, every single day: "Where are my tickets?", "Why can't I see my barcode?", "I'm at the gate and I can't get in." These weren't edge cases. They were the totally predictable symptom of a system that left people to figure out retrieval solo, under pressure. That pattern became the heart of the design problem.
Support ticket analysisJourney pain pointsVolume mapping
🔍
Key insight
Every additional step increased anxiety
Here's the reframe that cracked it wide open: stop asking "how do we help people retrieve tickets?" and start asking "how do we build a seamless path from purchase to venue entry?" That shift meant redesigning the whole connected ecosystem (email, account, authentication, retrieval, and game-day reminders) as one coherent experience, not just polishing a single screen.
Systems thinkingJourney reframeXFN alignment
03 · Process
Four design principles, one connected system
Discovery handed me a clear set of marching orders. I turned them into four principles that steered every decision, then leaned hard on AI-powered tools to explore and prototype fast before locking anything in.
🎟️
Prioritise access over account management
People want their tickets, not a settings menu. So retrieval becomes the main event.
🧠
Reduce decision making
Every extra decision piles on friction. Cut the unnecessary steps between needing a ticket and holding one.
👁️
Create confidence through visibility
People should always know where they are and what's coming next. Uncertainty is the enemy.
📱
Design for event-day conditions
Design for thumbs, time pressure, and chaotic crowds, not for perfect lab conditions.
AI-assisted exploration
To get everyone aligned quickly, I used Figma AI to speed up early exploration around the dashboard, retrieval flows, and account structure. From there, I worked closely with engineering to pressure-test the experience and account for edge cases, then built an interactive prototype in V0 that covered everything from login and authentication to ticket retrieval and event-day entry. Having a realistic prototype helped product and engineering align on the details early and gave the team confidence before moving into development.
Interactive prototype: Ticket retrieval flow, real screens from account to barcode
Step 1 of 5
Event-first account
Order Status: Tickets Ready
The redesigned account puts order status front and center with a 3-step progress indicator. The primary CTA (View Tickets) is big, green, full-width, and impossible to miss. No menu-digging required.
Design decision: rebuild the account around event access, so order status and tickets become the main event.
⚡I didn't use AI to crank out finished designs. I used it to validate directions fast and spend my time where it actually counted, on the nuanced decisions that static screens could never capture.
04 · Solution
A connected ecosystem, not just a fresh coat of paint
Instead of polishing pages one at a time, I designed four interconnected solutions that work together to carry people from purchase to gate as one genuinely seamless journey.
Redesigned journey: Connected ecosystem, from purchase to gate entry
Event-first account redesign
The old account buried tickets as just one of a dozen settings. I rebuilt the entire information architecture around upcoming events and ticket access, flipping the whole experience from "account management" to "event access." Upcoming events take the spotlight, and persistent "View Tickets" CTAs create a direct, one-tap path straight to retrieval.
Solution 2: Redesigned user account, order status and ticket access
Order status redesigned
Tickets Ready status with progress tracker + prominent View Tickets CTA
Order Status Before
Clear eTicket ready confirmation with order details and barcode access
Game-day ticket reminder notifications
Discovery showed people were hunting for their tickets while walking to the venue, waiting in security, or circling for parking. So instead of hoping they'd remember to dig them out, I designed proactive game-day reminders that surface ticket access at the exact moment it's needed. Retrieval went from a scavenger hunt to a single tap.
📲The whole idea: bring the tickets to the customer instead of making the customer go hunt for them. That move from reactive retrieval to proactive surfacing turned out to be the single most impactful change in the entire experience.
Design: iOS push notification, the game-day reminder that shows up at exactly the right moment
Push notification fires on game day: event, venue, and time at a glance
Triggered at the right moment
Reminders fire on game day, right when people actually need their tickets (walking to the venue, parking, meeting friends), not hours early when they'd just forget all over again.
One-tap direct access
The notification shows event name, venue, and time at a glance, and one tap drops people straight into ticket retrieval. No email digging, no account spelunking, no relying on memory.
Secure ticket retrieval experience
Working inside Ticketmaster Secure Render's requirements, I designed authentication flows that balance ironclad security with actual usability. People could verify successfully, finally understand why verification was even necessary, and reach their barcodes with confidence, all while staying fully compliant with secure ticket delivery standards.
Interactive prototype: Secure ticket retrieval, from authentication to barcode access
Step 1 of 4
Authentication required
Verify your account to access tickets
Before the barcode shows up, people get a clear heads-up on why verification matters: Ticketmaster requires it to keep tickets safe from unauthorized access. Setting expectations early heads off frustration down the line.
Set expectations and explain why verification is needed.
🔐The security requirements weren't going anywhere, but they could absolutely be explained. Contextual messaging at every authentication step turned a confusing wall into a reassuring, guided process.
05 · Results
Measurable impact across support, access, and retention
The redesign delivered clear, quantifiable wins across every dimension of the post-purchase experience, from support volume and account access to event-day confidence and whether people came back to buy again.
↓18%
Reduction in ticket retrieval support contacts. Better visibility, cleaner navigation, and game-day reminders quieted the event-day panic calls.
↑12%
Increase in successful first-attempt ticket access. People found their tickets without bouncing across a half-dozen touchpoints.
↓22%
Reduction in password reset and account access issues. Clearer post-purchase guidance knocked out the most common authentication blockers.
↑9%
Increase in post-purchase account engagement. With retrieval now front and center, more people actually leaned into the logged-in experience.
↑15%
Increase in game-day ticket access before venue arrival. Proactive reminders got tickets in hand before the gate, not while standing at it.
↑4%
Increase in repeat purchase rate. People who went through the redesigned flow came back for future purchases more often.
💡The downstream effect was crystal clear: people who grabbed their tickets without ever calling support were far more likely to come back. Cutting friction at the gate didn't just feel better, it moved retention.
NPS improvement tracked via HubSpot
Post-launch, I tracked customer sentiment in HubSpot's NPS tool, watching scores climb week over week as people hit the redesigned retrieval experience. An audience that started out heavy on detractors shifted meaningfully toward promoters over the six months after launch.
HubSpot NPS: Post-launch sentiment tracking, a 6-month window
HubSpot NPS, post-launch monitoring
NPS score
+42
vs. +18 pre-launch
Promoters
68%
up from 44%
Detractors
26%
down from 44%
Responses
1.2k
6-month window
NPS score trend
Pre-launch baseline
Response breakdown by sentiment
😡
Very unhappy
8%
😞
Unhappy
18%
😐
Neutral
6%
😊
Happy
30%
😄
Very happy
38%
26% detractors6% passive68% promoters
06 · Takeaways
What I'd carry into every project
→
The most important moment is often after the conversion
So much product thinking obsesses over getting people to buy. This project was a great reminder that the experience after checkout, when people actually need to use the thing they paid for, matters just as much. Designing for the full lifecycle, not just the funnel, is what builds lasting trust.
→
Proactive design beats reactive design
The game-day notification proved a beautifully simple principle: instead of building better search, kill the need to search at all. Bringing the right information to people at the right moment, before they even think to ask, removes friction at the source instead of patching it downstream.
→
Cross-functional partnership is a design tool
The sharpest insights here didn't come from a research lab. They came from Marketing and Customer Service. The patterns hiding in support tickets and email analytics told a clearer story than any survey could. Building real relationships across teams and treating their data as design input is a skill that makes every single outcome better.
