Context
During Utrip's Hack Week, I led the UI/UX design on a project to create an MVP solution for a dynamic package recommendation engine (focused on live sports, music, and entertainment).
Timeline
Winter 2016
My Role
UI/UX Design
Project Management
Deliverables
Design Documentation
Final Prototype
Methods
Sketching
Wireframing
Rapid Prototyping
Impact
The technology developed during the creation of Utrip Live had a significant impact on the business. Previously the Content Team spent ~5 mins manually creating hours for each venue. Today, our SeatGeek API ingestion tool enables them to grab hours for nearly any venue in a single click.
97%
Reduced venue hours creation time
800+
Venues on Utrip using SeatGeek hours
Challenge
How might we use dynamic packaging to encourage travelers to book live events?
Research
Live event ticket sales is a USD $30 billion industry (source: Statista), that is rapidly adopting personalization. Through our research, we identified an opportunity to use personalization to create dynamic packages for travelers, based on their interests.
Cold start problem
Any recommendation model needs data from which to make inferences for users. Given the short timeline, the most efficient way to provide the system with data was to ask the user for permission to import their Facebook likes.
Live events data
We evaluated a few different ticket providers and found SeatGeek’s API to be the most flexible and easiest to use.
Ideation & Prototyping
Our goal was to create a simple product that ingested a user’s interests (e.g. favorite sports teams, musicians, artists, etc.), and used those preferences to identify time periods where two or more of those interests overlapped in the same destination. We then wanted to enable users to book tickets to the recommended events.
Merchandising
Once users selected one of the recommended trips, they could click to buy any and all of the live events personalized for them in their package, directly from SeatGeek.
Trip Planning
Users could also export their package into a personalized Utrip itinerary, from which they could further customize their trip experience.
Design & Iteration
We successfully built Utrip Live over the course of one week, going from sketches to a functional MVP. We were even mentioned in the Seattle Times.
Live events are unforgettable
Live events are entertaining, unique, unpredictable, and an important piece of a traveler's experience, which is why we would eventually enable live events to override dinner recommendations on the itinerary, build mechanisms to import live event feeds from partners, etc.
What I Learned
I worked with our CTO, Head of Data Science, and Director of Business Development to design / build Utrip Live in one week, thus I had to learn how to effectively communicate design requirements in a short amount of time.
Hack Week
The Utrip Live project, taught me to embrace spontaneous, interdisciplinary projects, because they enable you to gain new perspectives, solve complex problems, and often provide future learnings / tools to utilize down the road.
Evaluating project scope
I also learned how to formulate a better process to evaluate whether a new idea is within immediate scope. I learned to assess a project’s holistic value, viability, and resource requirements against the company’s KPIs.
