frosen.design

01 / CONTEXT

Competing for the last-minute fan

The project started with a clear commercial and behavioural gap.

A significant amount of ticket inventory was still going unsold close to the event, while more fans were making spontaneous decisions later in the purchase journey. Internal research showed that 60% of resale listings remained unsold , and Ticketmaster was also underperforming competitors in how fans perceived it for last-minute ticket buying.

A subsequent study of 1,000 last-minute ticket buyers reinforced the opportunity. Ticketmaster still held strong overall share, but competitors were winning specific audiences and categories — particularly Gen Z, sports and fans responding to price, FOMO and convenience.

The challenge was not simply to sell more tickets. It was to make Ticketmaster more useful at the exact moment a fan was deciding what events are of interest to them given their time constraints, proximity, and availability.

02 / OPPORTUNITY

Meet fans where intent already exists

I reviewed GameTime, SeatGeek, TickPick, StubHub, AXS, Vivid Seats and Eventbrite to see how they helped fans find events at short notice. I used Claude to synthesise my findings and compare how each platform used time and location to guide discovery.

The pattern was consistent: competitors were making time and location first-class discovery signals, using constructs such as Today, Tonight, This Weekend and Near You, often paired with pricing or reassurance messaging.

I used similar patterns alongside our own research to define a Ticketmaster-native direction: surface relevant events happening soon across the places fans already browse.

Five Discovery surfaces were in scope: Artist Detail Pages, Venue Detail Pages, City Destination Pages, Category Pages and the Homepage. The design challenge was therefore less about creating a carousel and more about defining a reusable discovery system that could adapt across different contexts.

03 / ROLE

Designing the system, not just the component

I was the lead Designer responsible for the initiative across Global Discovery, working closely with Product, Engineering, Analytics, SEO/AEO and content teams.

I owned the experience from early exploration through production, including module placement, Ai exploration, card design, imagery, urgency badges, responsive behaviour, visibility rules, localisation edge cases and the adaptation of the system across five page types.

A significant part of the work sat beyond the interface itself. I also worked with Engineering on image sourcing, badge logic, category-title behaviour, app WebView navigation and rules determining when the module should appear, collapse or disappear entirely.

04 / EVIDENCE

Making urgency useful, not noisy

The research showed that last-minute behaviour was not one-dimensional. Younger fans skewed toward spontaneity, mobile, FOMO and price, while older fans were more influenced by schedule certainty, seat quality and trust.

That reinforced a key design principle: urgency needed to help fans make a decision quickly without turning the experience into promotional noise.

I explored a badge system combining Today / Tomorrow, location relevance and availability signals such as Limited Availability, Low Availability and Sold Out. Several iterations helped refine the hierarchy and establish which information belonged directly on the card.

Artist Detail Pages became the first major implementation and the template for the wider system. One of the biggest open questions was imagery, so I explored alternative treatments and ran an A/B test comparing two designs.

The result was inconclusive: neither variant produced a statistically meaningful conversion uplift. Rather than force a redesign without evidence, we retained the existing treatment and carried that learning into later work.

05 / KEY DECISIONS & TRADE-OFFS

One system across five contexts

Although the final designs are visually similar across Ticketmaster’s Discovery ecosystem, the surrounding context changes the role of the module.

On Artist and Venue pages, the experience sits close to the primary event inventory and acts as a faster route into events happening imminently. On City and Category pages, it becomes a broader discovery tool, helping fans scan what is available nearby or within a type of entertainment they already care about. On Homepage, it sits more quietly within an existing hierarchy of discovery modules.

I used Claude during design exploration to demonstrate how fans would interact with the module on different Discovery pages and how its states would change. Across those pages, I focused on the parts that needed to adapt: placement, imagery, content hierarchy and copy logic.

Category Pages introduced additional complexity through dynamic headings, from Concerts Happening This Weekend to Basketball Games Happening This Week. I worked with Engineering to account for taxonomy, localisation and visibility rules, ensuring the module adapted to each context and disappeared when it offered no additional value.

06 / SOLUTION

A shared language for time-sensitive discovery

The final solution established a consistent interaction model across Ticketmaster:

Relevant inventory + clear time window + urgency signal + familiar event information

The system remained recognisable wherever it appeared, but adapted enough to feel native to the page around it.

That balance was important. The goal was not to create a separate Last Minute Tickets product inside Ticketmaster, but to make time a more useful dimension of the existing discovery experience.

07 / IMPACT

Turning urgency into measurable behaviour

We measured whether the module helped fans reach event pages, how often they used it after launch and how easily they could find Ticketmaster through search.

In the same one-day snapshot, 1.38% of sessions with a carousel click ended in a purchase, compared with 0.58% when the carousel appeared without a click. Fans chose whether to click, so the comparison tells us about the audience engaging with the module. The venue-page experiment provides the clearest evidence that the design itself changed behaviour.

08 / CONCLUSION

Designing the system around the moment

Last Minute Tickets started with a clear commercial problem, but the research and competitor analysis showed that the deeper issue was one of discovery: fans were increasingly making decisions closer to event time, while other platforms were already designing around that behaviour.

The design challenge became one of creating a system that could work across different user intents, content types, page structures and markets without becoming a collection of one-off solutions.

The project reinforced three principles that continue to shape how I work: design the system as well as the interface, use experimentation to remove opinion from decisions, and treat implementation logic as part of the experience.

The outcome was not simply a carousel shipped across five pages. It was a reusable way for Ticketmaster to make time-sensitive discovery part of the product, with measurable impact on engagement, conversion and search visibility.