How Vivid Seats Brings Designers to the Forefront of UX Research
Learn tactical tips on using an embedded matrix model for continuous insights, without getting bogged down by reactive research practices.
Vivid Seats is a ticket marketplace—and the only one that has a rewards program.
Dscout Customer and Community Marketing Manager, Colleen Pate, sat down with Brad Mattan to learn how the company uses an embedded matrix model to drive continuous discovery research—and helped designers become an integrated part of the process.
Brad Mattan is a Senior UX Researcher at Vivid Seats.
Jump to…
How Vivid Seat's research evolved
Brad Mattan: From the beginning, the purpose and drive of UX research at Vivid Seats has been to help stakeholders make decisions.
About a year ago we switched it up and brought UXR into different product groups. There are several reasons for doing this and I won't get into all of them, but I will say one pain point that we experienced in UX research was not always understanding or knowing what was going on as far as the decisions that needed to be made.
People came to us when they needed answers, but we didn't necessarily understand or know the full context behind why we were pursuing what we were pursuing. This limits your ability to make good research recommendations and even just set up the study if you don't know the full context.
We ended up switching to a more embedded matrix model where each UX researcher was embedded into a specific team. So that's how I came to be more involved with the web team. That's how Evelyn came to be more involved with the app team. And so now we're attending all of these stand-up meetings and seeing the day-to-day.
We can now anticipate what questions might come up, see what some of the blockers are, and put together better research that answers those questions in a timely fashion.
✔ Using an embedded matrix model to enable faster and more flexible research
Brad Mattan: This is around the same time we ended up switching to doing more continuous discovery research. The idea was, "hey, we can do this. We can talk to customers regularly.
We know things are moving fast and stakeholders have questions, so one thing that came out of this was the decision to talk to customers on a more regular basis. One big drive for this was that we were in a period of rapid development and innovation. It was very difficult for research to keep up with all the changes that were happening.
This is how we landed on continuous discovery research. We are not able to do the full process where we have a research question, do some research, inform the decision, and then decide that the development is happening at such a rapid clip—but we can keep up with questions and at least understand how this is impacting our users.
We started to implement this program where we would talk to customers, one or two customers a week, and pay special attention to some of the releases that just happened in that week and then monitor that over time.
We're tracking the analytics, of course (and that's a whole other side of UX research) but the qualitative piece was really important because we could understand why users were not using filters, for example.
“We started to implement this program of continuous discovery research, where we would talk to customers, one or two customers a week, and pay special attention to some of the releases that just happened in that week and then monitor that over time.”
Senior UX Researcher at Vivid Seats
✔ Working with designer colleagues to take part in research
Brad Mattan: One important piece here is buy-in from leadership.
Our manager of UX, Danny Zagorski, has been encouraging our team of designers and researchers to develop our skills more broadly. So we're not just doing research or just doing designs, we're expanding out that skillset. We might have one area of focus, but we want to be able to support our colleagues across the board.
With that push from management, we ended up getting buy-in from the whole design team. Everybody wanted research! Evelyn and I had very limited capacity to deliver on that, but now with this push for designers to get more involved in research, we're growing our capacity exponentially because there are so many more designers than researchers.
It’s been great to see designers have been stepping up and learning research. Some had very limited resources and different levels, to begin with, but I've seen steady leveling up across the board, and that's encouraging to see.
Now, if we have a research question and our UX researchers are busy with certain areas of focus, we can have one of our designers lead this project.
“With this push for designers to get more involved in research, we're growing our capacity exponentially because there are so many more designers than researchers.
It’s been great to see designers have been stepping up and learning research. Some had very limited resources and different levels, to begin with, but I've seen steady leveling up across the board.”
Senior UX Researcher at Vivid Seats
Tips to support design in leading research
Brad Mattan: It partly depends on where the designer is as far as their research chops. For some, we had one who was ready to dive right into moderation. Others needed a bit more practice with understanding how research works from the ground up.
For example, we have a designer who's just getting into research and is really eager and excited to do it, but didn't have a lot of that background. Here's how I got them up to speed:
- I ended up working with this designer first on note-taking. This parallels my training in UX research.
- Afterward, I would go through the notes, and provide line-by-line feedback. She gradually leveled up and has phenomenal notes.
- The next step then is to take those notes and translate them into something that we can share with stakeholders.
- The final step, and this is the one that's scary for folks who haven't done it before, but that's moderating, which turns out to not be so scary in the end but that's something, and you'll gradually coach over time.
I will say something like continuous discovery research is very useful for building up the skills of researchers because it's relatively low stakes. If you have a session that doesn't go great, it's not the end of the world. It's okay. It's one session. You're not ruining any particular project.
✔ Implementing a continuous discovery practice
Brad Mattan: Typically how the week works for us is: I'll start the week and put out a post in our UX design research Slack channel and say, “Hey, this week I'll be leading a session with a user using mobile web. Do we have any prototypes, any questions, or any areas of focus that you want to make sure that we cover in this session?”
This is part of how we're informing decisions at a more rapid cadence. Whereas before they might've had to approach UX research and ask, “In a couple of weeks, can we do this project?”
Now, we can get those answers the same day or the next day. It might not be a full study, but you're going to get at least one user detailed feedback where you have the opportunity to ask them why and ask them follow-up session questions in the session.
Sometimes designers and stakeholders don't have anything that they want to touch on. So we do have a discussion guide that we will follow that covers the basics like, "Tell me about the last time you were shopping for tickets. What sort of live events do you like to go to?"
Then, we'll of course have a usability session where they'll run through the mobile website and simulate shopping for tickets. In general, that’s how this session works.
Recruiting [is] a really important piece, and that's actually where Dscout shines for us.
We can run a screener. My colleague, Evelyn, put together a beautiful screener for Q4 that asks a bunch of things that we care about, and that we're thinking about currently in this quarter. We got something like 170 responses to that screener. Now we've got a good set of users who are live event attendees.
This is the audience we're typically talking to. We know some of their basic behaviors about how many times a year they go and what sort of live events they like to attend, which is great.
If we have a specific question or we need to talk to a sports fan, for example, that's going to allow us to have a very specific user that touches on the questions that interest us at that given point in time.
At the beginning of the week (once we know what questions we want to ask, and what areas we want to cover) we'll go into the screener, look through the screener responses, and find a user that closely matches the profile of the person that we want to talk to that week.
We'll send them an invite and Scouts are super fast at responding. They usually confirm within half a day or so, and that's all there is to it as far as designers and those who are moderating, it's not just the UX researchers. Now, I'll reach out to one of our designers and ask, “Hey, will you be moderating an interview this week?”
“Recruiting [is] a really important piece, and that's actually where Dscout shines for us.”
Senior UX Researcher at Vivid Seats
✔ Communicating insights to the broader team and org
Brad Mattan: A lot of people, when they talk about continuous discovery research, they ask, how good can one interview a week do?
It doesn't sound like much, it's not a huge project with multiple pages that drive people. But this is just as important, if not more than that sort of research because it allows you to make decisions quickly.
I'll touch on a few examples of how we've done that.
1. Getting rapid feedback on early prototypes
Designers in the past might have put a lot of thought into a prototype so they could prepare it for research and spend a week collecting data, getting analysis done, and sharing it out.
Now, they can rapidly create a prototype, share it with a customer, get some feedback, and then continue iterating on it. Maybe they'll ask about it again in the following week, or maybe once they're more comfortable after getting one user's feedback they’ll decide to do a dedicated study on this. We have that kind of flexibility now and it’s great to have that other tool in the tool belt.
2. Celebrating wins on Slack
If you're a developer, you spend a lot of time in code and you might not get to see the impact right away. After you push that release live it takes some time.
We do pay attention to the analytics and look at how the data is moving, but sometimes it's just nice to see a quick win. For example, if you go on our website or our app, you'll see deal scores. We recently made some improvements in this area and lo and behold, we had one user the first time see this deal score and say, “Oh wow, I'm going to go with this one. This is helpful. It helps me to know which ticket to go with.”
Being able to capture those wins and moments of user delight and share it with all the stakeholders It's been really rewarding and encouraging for everyone.
3. Building cross-functional empathy and improving accessibility
We have people from areas like marketing, for example, who don't typically get to see how the customers interact with the website. We can discuss their responses to emails or pop-ups that appear on the website.
Suddenly they're getting to see how users in real time get to respond to a braze model and get some feedback there. They're doing a lot of experimentation, but now they have this additional qualitative piece.
There was a great session we had on Dscout with a user who is visually impaired. She was not able to see the screen and was using a screen reader. She shared a lot of valuable insights with us. One of them is that she typically avoids websites and will go on apps because those typically are a bit more accessibility friendly but even then, not great.
She also shared that usually if the app doesn't work, she won't waste her time with it and will resort to calling customer service to see if they can help her get a ticket that's accessible. We got to talk a little bit about customer service and this led to us capturing a bunch of clips, and sharing that with our friends and customer service team. It just spun a lot of discussions about how we can be more accessibility friendly.
It wasn't a very long session, but those 20 minutes that we spoke with her were super, super valuable. I can't stress enough the cross-functional empathy that we're building and the surprises that we end up running into that we may not have run into if all we did were a couple of studies a month. By continuously talking to our customers, we get to have those moments where we see the world through the perspective of others.
Tips for implementing your own continuous discovery research
Brad Mattan: [It’s important to take] the time to be intentional and think through how you want to approach continuous discovery research.
You have to make sure that you have buy-in from your leadership, your manager, and whoever is in charge of UX and research because, without that, it can be very hard to get designers or PMs on board.
If you're in the very early stages, think about where you are and how you want to get there. Perhaps organize a book club around Continuous Discovery Habits. For us, that was the catalyst. That was the spark that got us going!
After we read that book, as I mentioned, I put together a draft outlining our approach to recruitment, how we were going to share the findings, and who we wanted to have involved in these sessions. I reached out to people personally too. Having people listening in, even if they're multitasking, is better than nothing at all.
You may also like…
Subscribe To People Nerds
A weekly roundup of interviews, pro tips and original research designed for people who are interested in people
