Creating a sector-leading purchase path for the Southbank Centre

 

Client

The Southbank Centre

Services

UX & UI // Web Development // Tessitura Integration

The Brief.

The Southbank Centre is Europe’s largest arts centre, consisting of 4 venues and hosting thousands of events to 4.36 million visitors during 2019 alone. With such a vast amount of visitors, The Southbank Centre had an aspiration to deliver a best in class digital experience which would set the standard for the arts and culture sector, in turn increasing the proportion and value of online sales through a more efficient checkout experience.

Southbank wished to keep the content management of their events within their Drupal site, and to create a bespoke experience for their Tessitura purchase path, that would give them the flexibility to sell a range of products such as seated events, timed entry, donations, memberships, and gift memberships/voucher. With such a wide range of offerings and a high volume of orders, a feature-rich account area was also key to help the Southbank Centre allow their users to self-serve.

 

Insight.

A major challenge for an organisation the size of Southbank Centre is allowing for their regular (and irregular) spikes in demand for event on-sales. Catering for high demand whilst providing a feature-rich experience is often challenging for any application, and required careful consideration on our approach to any given solution.

This ultimately meant that an approach to efficiency from both a user and infrastructure perspective would be critical to our success.

Research & Discovery.

We began our discovery process by reviewing the Southbank Centre’s existing purchase path with the web team. Having reviewed their funnels and their session recordings, it was clear there were various usability challenges in both the login & registration journey and the seat selection map, with both sections suffering from large drop-offs. User feedback also stated that the nature of upsells and fees was often confusing and alienated many of them.

We also reviewed data to understand how the existing site coped with demand and the nature of how visits occurred. We found that on a busy-day the Southbank website could attract over 49,000 visitors, much of these often at once, due to on-sales.

Our research into existing purchase habits and site usage showed how users often struggled with common tasks critical to success and how these were compounded by scale of demand, we distilled our findings into 3 core areas.

Key findings.

1. The site needed to be able to perform quickly and scale up to meet demand.

2. The purchase path needed to be re-envisioned from a users perspective.

3. Users would be able to self-serve with a more effective account area.

Key findings.

 

1. The site needed to be able to perform quickly and scale up to meet demand.

Being the largest centre for arts in Europe meant that the purchase path needed to be able to cope with high-demand and ramp up quickly in order to meet it. During on-sale days, traffic could double that of the previous day.

Skyway utilises a micro-application architecture which means we are able to use the best technology for each part of the application, rather than relying on one monolithic application. It is also highly scalable, meaning that any individual part of the application that is experiencing high load can be scaled automatically and independently. 

Load testing of the application showed us that Skyway was able to handle all as many concurrent users as possible before the Tessitura seat server reached its limit. Skyway is also fully integrated with Queue-It at the CDN level, allowing for Southbank to easily control the influx of users as required.

During load testing, we were able to run up to 100 orders per minute with 250 concurrent users, maintaining an average response time of ~900ms. After this point, the Tessitura seat server began timing out. These figures are, of course, highly dependant on the scale of the backend applications, both with regard to Skyway and Tessitura, but proved successful for our requirements.

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2. The purchase path needed to be re-envisioned from a users perspective.

With event ticketing one of the main focuses for users, we reviewed the existing journey for usability issues and reviewed user feedback. Our funnel for the event booking journey showed that over 80% of users were dropping off at the login/registration step, we reviewed the registration journey to reduce the number of fields and to make the section feel less tasking. We introduced social login via Google to help users on return visits and also an address lookup service to reduce the amount of information we need to ask of users.

We also overhauled the seat selection interface, to create a more engaging, easy-to-understand interface, by adding filters and a key that indicated area, price and seat type as well as a more intuitive pinch & zoom feature for mobile devices. 

Ensuring our solution was accessible was really important to both ourselves and the Southbank Centre. We worked with an independent accessibility testing company to audit all key pages to WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines, and we are continuing to work with the Southbank Centre team to keep pushing this further.

3. Users would be able to self-serve with a more effective account area.

Last year saw the website handle several hundred thousand transactions, including tickets, memberships, donations and gift vouchers. With such a high-volume of sales, it was critical that users be able to self-serve to avoid overwhelming back-office staff with common tasks. The Southbank Centre team had identified common challenges staff and users faced alike and we worked with them to understand how we could work to automate them. 

We introduced a range of features, including an overview area for members, where they could see their benefits, access their member barcode to scan in, see upcoming events and previous orders.

We also worked to create an access requirements section, where users that required assistance could specify their exact needs. Any requirements set here would then be added onto any orders they placed via Skyway, ensuring that the Southbank Centre would be able to accommodate any needs with advance notice. Users are also able to complete common tasks all in one place, such as updating their name, address, email preferences and login credentials.

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Partnership and collaboration at its core.

 

Using our Skyway product, we implemented a frontend application for Southbank Centre that utilises the latest in web technologies to provide a world-class user experience across all types of devices and is built with accessibility in mind from the ground up. We were able to offer bespoke purchase pathways for different types of events - their gallery tickets clearly require a very different user interface to their seated performances, for example. With our in-depth knowledge of Tessitura, we were able to work very closely with the in-house team at Southbank Centre to overcome some significant challenges around how the events are set up and ticketed in order to provide the best possible experience for their users.

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