Stratford Festival | Red Thread Innovations

At a glance

The Stratford Festival faced challenges with an outdated website that resulted in high user drop-off and low conversion rates, ultimately impacting revenue. Red Thread Innovations partnered with Stratford Festival to redesign the ticket purchasing process, focusing on improving the mobile experience and streamlining the user journey to increase conversion rates and drive more ticket sales.
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Service: UX/UI Design

Expertise

Product Strategy

UX Research

UI & UX Design

Technology

User Personas

User Flow Mapping

Heuristic Evaluation

Mobile-first Design

Challenge

The Stratford Festival's website faced several critical issues: an outdated web experience, high user drop-off due to suboptimal user experience, and low conversion rates. They sought to implement a brand new user experience that would make the ticket purchasing process more intuitive, while also facilitating upsells and donations and incorporating a user feedback mechanism.

Solution

RTI conducted a comprehensive Discovery to understand Stratford Festival’s user personas, map the current experience, and complete a heuristic design audit to identify key problem areas in the user experience. We employed a mobile-first approach to redesign user flows, rectifying UX issues and streamlining navigation, seat selection, and the cart-to-checkout process. The new UX seamlessly incorporated upsells and donations, while adding a user feedback mechanism post-checkout.

Result

The redesign received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the Stratford Festival team, who felt that the new experience was intuitive and addressed the critical issues impacting conversion rates and ticket sales. While the redesign has not yet been implemented, the client is enthusiastic about the potential improvements in conversions and ticket sales through these UX enhancements. The next step involves validating the solutions through user testing before final implementation.

User-Centric Discovery

Through a comprehensive understanding of the problems Stratford Festival was trying to solve, RTI developed user personas to thoroughly understand end users and mapped the current user flows to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. We also conducted competitive and market research to contextualize UX gaps in contrast to industry standards.

Heuristics Evaluation

RTI conducted a thorough heuristic evaluation of the existing website, unearthing several key issues, including: confusing navigation; unclear correlation between the seat map and actual theater layout, making it difficult for users to select desired seats; unintuitive UI elements and poor map controls in the seat selection process, with crucial information missing for mobile users; and information overload on the cart and checkout pages, obscuring the path-to-checkout and resulting in user drop-off.

Intuitive Showtime & Seat Selection

RTI streamlined the seat selection process by introducing a "preview seats" button, allowing users to view seat maps and easily toggle between different showtimes. The seat selection experience features clear stage views and section buttons with price ranges. When users select a section, they access a dedicated modal with independent controls and filters,pricing details, and a confirmation step, making it easier for users to select their desired seats.

Streamlined Cart-to-Checkout Flow

The original cart to checkout process on Stratford Festival's website was cluttered and confusing, with excessive upsells and information obscuring the path to purchase. RTI redesigned this flow by prominently displaying selected tickets and providing clear "Continue shopping" and "Checkout" buttons. Upsells were implemented seamlessly below the fold, while additional purchase options, such as donations, were moved to a separate screen within the checkout flow. This change simplified the primary purchase path, reducing distractions and making the checkout process more intuitive and efficient.

Integrating User Feedback to Drive Continuous Value

RTI integrated a comprehensive feedback function, including an NPS score feature, to gather user insights and drive continuous improvement. This proactive approach enables Stratford Festival to collect valuable feedback from users, ensuring the redesign can evolve to meet their needs and preferences. By regularly analyzing this feedback, Stratford Festival can make data-driven enhancements, consistently delivering value and improving the overall user experience.