frosen.design

01 / CONTEXT

From three disconnected page types to one global experience

Ticketmaster already had city-related experiences, but they had evolved separately across platforms and markets.

North America had filterable City Genre Pages that were difficult to discover outside search. International markets had richer city guides that were buried and not indexable, while other markets still relied on legacy city pages managed through older tooling.

Together, city pages accounted for only around 1% of discovery visits, despite being the only part of the experience designed to answer a simple question: what’s happening in this city?

The original brief was relatively tactical: consolidate the existing city experiences. But the evidence suggested there was a larger opportunity than simply recreating what already existed.

02 / OPPORTUNITY

Turning a platform clean-up into a discovery product

The traffic numbers initially made city pages look small. SEO told a different story.

Despite their limited visibility, existing city pages were already Ticketmaster’s third-largest organic entry point behind Artist Pages and the Homepage, and represented 11% of SEO traffic for fans searching for local events.

At the same time, broader searches such as things to do in Los Angeles were being captured by competitors and travel platforms rather than Ticketmaster.
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We reframed the project around a new parent experience:

The goal was to connect three things that had previously been treated separately:

Organic acquisition → event discovery → ticket purchase

Rather than immediately optimise everything for conversion, the initial north star focused on search visibility and organic traffic, with deeper commercial optimisation informed by what we learned after launch.

03 / ROLE

Leading design and research from definition to validation

I led design and user research across the core initiative, working with Product, Engineering, SEO and Marketing from early discovery through to the validated experience.
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I was the sole designer on the core work, responsible for the desktop and mobile experience as well as the research and synthesis that shaped it.

My work included:

Product strategy · User research · Research synthesis · Workshops · Information architecture · Prototyping · Interaction design · UI design · Analytics · Engineering collaboration

I designed and facilitated the discovery workshops, helped turn the opportunity into roughly 200 ideas and an initial prioritisation, planned the research approach with our researcher, co-moderated interviews and led the synthesis into MVP changes and future recommendations.  

A principle I carried through the work was that recommendations needed evidence behind them. Findings were connected to hypotheses and participant counts rather than relying on individual quotes or design preference.

04 / EVIDENCE

Combining behavioural data with fan research

We used different evidence sources to answer different parts of the problem.

• Users wanted better ways to narrow large amounts of content

• Top-level categories sometimes felt too broad

• Price was the most consistently requested missing information

• “Featured” was interpreted as paid promotion

• Editorial content was the least valued module

• 33 of 40 participants wanted “This month”, compared with 29 wanting “This weekend”

05 / KEY DECISIONS & TRADE-OFFS

Balancing what ranks with what helps fans choose

06 / SOLUTION

One flexible system for hundreds of cities

The final City Destination Page was designed as a journey from orientation to choice.

It combined:

• City introduction

• Must-see events

• Date-based discovery, including 'This week' and 'This month' pre-defined filters

• Best-selling events by major category

• All events list

• Venue discovery

• Editorial content

Behind the interface, we designed the experience as a configurable system rather than an individual page.

The solution included:

• A consistent global URL structure

• City identifiers and geographic radius

• City-specific configuration

• Rules for indexing and SEO metadata

• API-fed event and venue content

• Configurable editorial and module ordering

The same underlying experience could therefore support a market like New York with thousands of events as well as much smaller destinations.

07 / IMPACT

From migration task to global discovery surface

By September 2025:

Performance began improving noticeably around 45 days after launch, before accelerating through the following months.
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Following the migration of the North American genre pages into the new structure, the SEO team described City Destination Pages as becoming the default landing experience for geographic queries.

The results also gave us a clearer picture of where the product was strongest. Transactional geographic queries such as concerts performed particularly well, while broader things to do searches remained a larger, less-proven opportunity.
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That evidence helped shape what should come next rather than treating launch as the end of the project.

08 / CONCLUSION

Designing the system behind the page

City Destination Pages started as a consolidation task and became a new way for Ticketmaster to capture and serve geographic discovery.

The most important design challenge was not determining how a city page should look. It was defining what it needed to be good at, then balancing search visibility, fan utility and global scalability without pretending those needs would always align.

The project reinforced three principles that continue to shape how I work:

There are also things I would approach differently today. Price remains absent despite being one of the clearest research signals, and I would challenge that feasibility question earlier. I would also bring engineering setup into discovery sooner and invest earlier in the inspirational things to do layer that remains one of the largest opportunities for the product.