BACKGROUND
Sparxo Ticketing is Sparxo's flagship product. I worked with my co-founders on the product and I was the main driving force for user experience and product development on the project. I worked with design contractors and interns on this project throughout the years. I referred one design intern to my previous employer, VMware. She currently works there today. This was a fun way to mix my two design worlds.
As we were building the product and business we believed in releasing fast, early and often. This agile approach allowed us to intake constant user feedback.
PREFACE
The following is a highlight on aspects of the design process. I also want to highlight design decisions that were more interesting. I believe in painting a product vision on how extensive a feature set can become so that we can make early decisions on engineering architecture but also it is important to find the smallest project to create and release so that we can release often. Smalls successful projects builds momentum and reduces risk. We worked closely with our early adopters for direction.
I love working with people to brainstorm design ideas in LoFi mediums such as sketching, white boarding, or wireframing. This has to be balanced with properly sharing the design vision.
Process
The design process can be applied to any challenge. For large projects the need for iteration on both the design process and the design itself is needed to constantly improve. Through the many releases and redesigns of Sparxo Ticketing, improvement and iteration was done with design thinking in mind.
PRODUCT GROWTH
Product and user experience visioning was divided into three parts: what we heard from our customers, features that supported our company vision, and personal features to keep our lives interesting. We also believed an 80/20 rule. 80% of our features could be the same as our competitors as long as we had 20% features unique to Sparxo. Marketing consultants, partners, sales could all propose bugs, features and changes.
CONCEPT REVIEW
When adjusting flows, we would have a concept review. Mockups would be created to solve a handful of customer requests. The following is an overview of new feature experience that is shared with the whole team for feedback. The concept is also presented to our partners and customers for feedback. In this processes we are looking to align the vision and understand next steps before working on details.
PARADIGMS
In the boundaries of an application I find it important to build consistent paradigms. As features were added to our system, it was apparent that we needed to make it easier to discover each feature. Users had a hard time understanding how settings could affect their event flow, publish settings, and operation tools. There were a lot of optional settings and we needed a way for our user to easily manage them.
HIGHLIGHTS
TASK BASED SEPARATION
When evaluating other ticketing systems. Often times payment transactions and tickets were in the same table. We defined that there was a separation of workflow for the user that required payments and tickets to be separate tables. This made the workflow easier and in larger organizations managing tickets and managing payments were event two separate users.
INTEGRATIONS
A framework was built for integrations. Sparxo has its own integrations. This was a great place to advertise our integrations along other integrations users were asking for. We created a framework to grow our integration library. Integrating with other platforms is a common ask by our customers. In addition, partnering with other platforms and having Sparxo in their integration library was a great top of the funnel discovery point for our platform.
COLLABORATION
We discovered early on, many event producers had different partners for each event. In other systems, partners would create an account for each event. Data collection cross events was hard, restricting the ability to create cross event analytics. We wanted to make it so every event producer only needed to create one Sparxo account and events could be shared on a one off bases. Collaboration was then put in the event creation workflow to encourage the use of the feature. No more sharing passwords, no more creating one off accounts.
RESULTS
Sparxo has a product development processes that is a balance of design thinking and meeting business objectives.