This project was completed in collaboration with a team of 5 other students for a class at the University of Minnesota.
Problem Statement:
College students seek distinctive experiences to enrich their time in academia before transitioning to the demands of professional life. These experiences encompass a diverse range, including sporting events, concerts, and shows. However, procuring tickets presents a challenge, with students encountering difficulties in both accessibility and affordability. Existing solutions are marred by exorbitant fees and inconsistent levels of safety and security, hindering students’ ability to secure tickets reliably and at fair prices. Furthermore, students grapple with concerns such as reselling tickets, identifying trustworthy sellers, and avoiding previously encountered scams.
Solution Approach To solve our original identified problem, we wanted to know more about users’ frustrations with their current form of buying and selling tickets. This led our group to send out surveys and interview individual students at the University of Minnesota to get a better understanding of what the existing issues were when buying and selling tickets. We realized students struggled to exchange tickets easily and efficiently on preexisting ticketing platforms like Ticketmaster and social media group chats (such as Facebook messaging, Snapchat, Instagram DM) due to invalid tickets, high price points, and scamming issues. We decided our implemented solution needed to be a platform that university students could easily access. In addition, implementing a verification process was necessary to ensure that students are selling and buying real tickets. In order to make our platform efficient, we decided to follow the format of a general ticketing app (such as Ticketmaster or StubHub) but allow only UMN students to use it. This criteria would only further contribute to the safety of the exchange that TicketX guarantees. We created LoFi prototypes on a whiteboard and took time as a group to run through the prototype as a potential user. We did this through cognitive walk-throughs where each group member noted a significant need for improvement. After this, we created a HiFi prototype using Figma where we implemented every process of our potential app. We then individually assessed the weak points of the HiFi prototype using heuristic evaluations and decided whether our final prototype would implement those changes. Lastly, we conducted six interviews with students comparing TicketX performance to the social media platforms they are already using to exchange tickets.