Revamping Ticketmaster's Ticket Resale Flow

Overview

Redesigned Ticketmaster's ticket resale experience to solve two distinct problems: a user pain point around pricing confidence, and a legal constraint introduced by the Live Nation merger.

Role

As the content designer, I partnered with design and product to prototype the new flow, collaborated with UX research to run discovery and usability testing, and worked with engineering to QA and ship.

Timeline

2019-2020

Problem

Fans list tickets for many reasons — plans change, conflicts come up, or they simply want to recoup costs. Whatever the reason, the experience of pricing their tickets wasn't working for them.

Problem A: Pricing in the dark

Fans had no reliable way to price their tickets. Without clear market context, they guessed — and typically undervalued what they had. Research showed fans edited their listings an average of 3–4 times and frequently never sold at all.

Problem B: A legal constraint driving fans elsewhere

Due to a conflict of interest stemming from Ticketmaster's merger with Live Nation — which owns several venues — certain events carry a minimum resale price. For those events, fans were listing on competing platforms like StubHub and SeatGeek instead. Worse, they weren't coming back.

Approach

Solving Problem A: Pricing confidence

We introduced an intuitive bar graph alongside contextual copy, giving fans real market data to price their tickets accurately from the start — no guesswork required.

Solving Problem B: Universal Fan Distribution (UFD)

We couldn't change the minimum price requirement. But we found a legal path forward: let fans list on competing marketplaces without ever leaving Ticketmaster.

We designed Universal Fan Distribution (UFD) — a Ticketmaster feature that lets fans safely list and sell their tickets across multiple trusted marketplaces at once, including StubHub, SeatGeek, and GameTime.

UFD guides fans through three steps:

  • List — Enter ticket details manually, or list directly from your account with autofill

    Price — Set a competitive price informed by real market data

    Get paid — Add bank account details for direct deposit when tickets sell

Final Experience

Redesigning the resale email journey: I also redesigned the end-to-end email journey to cover both standard resale and UFD — 9 emails in total, each triggered at a different point in the listing lifecycle.

The happy path is straightforward: fan lists tickets → tickets sell → seller gets paid. But the journey also accounts for edge cases: tickets approaching the event date unsold, unconfirmed deposit accounts, listing errors, and removed listings.

Each email was designed around a clear principle: the subject line should convey the crux of the message or the action needed — before the email is even opened. Inside, the header and CTA do the heavy lifting. Across all 9 emails, the tone and language feel like a single, continuous conversation — consistent with the UFD web experience

Results

  • –50% reduction in listing edits — fans priced accurately from the start

  • +13% increase in sell-through rate

  • +$40M increase in Gross Transaction Value (GTV)