Dear Ticketmaster, It’s Time To Redesign Your Tickets
By Matthew Lew
I’m a huge concert goer; more than 20 concerts in this past year. I’ve taken up volunteer ushering at venues to see my favorite musicians. My job requires me to check tickets and usher people to their seats—a manageable task, but after checking hundreds of Ticketmaster tickets, it’s very clear that these tickets were designed more than three decades ago without a serious look into how people interact with it.
So why redesign Ticketmaster tickets?
After reading Boarding Pass/Fail and Boarding Pass Redesign, that talk about redesigning confusing airplane boarding passes, I decided to use the same idea and apply it to Ticketmaster for a much needed redesign.
- It’s difficult to read, especially when the lights are darkened in a concert venue. The monospaced and capitalized type make it difficult to distinguish the different information on the card.
- The ticket design is as old as the cassette tape. Only cosmetic improvements have been introduced, but never a thoughtfully remastered design. If Ticketmaster is supposed to be the best service to buy tickets,maybe its design should live up to their name.
- It’s the only major ticket service that still prints tickets. Print-At-Home tickets and mobile tickets are popular options, and startup companies are on a crusade to beat Ticketmaster in the competitivedigital ticketing market. Ticketmaster is the only major company with the real power and capital to make their tickets into beautiful pieces of ephemera that become mementos of an experience—something a PDF just can’t do.
- Its tickets are lacking anti-counterfeiting measures. It’s no fun when shady ticket sellers make convincingly fake tickets to naive buyers. If tickets cost $50+, shouldn’t it have the same anti-counterfeiting tactics as a $20 dollar bill?
Alright, but why would Ticketmaster care?
Ticketmaster is the world’s leading ticket distributor, selling 25 million tickets in 2010 alone. Startup companies like TicketFly, Eventbrite, and Brown Paper Tickets are the tortoises trying to drive a wedge into Ticketmaster’s client base. Ticketmaster should not be the lazy hare when it comes to competitiveness. With “convenience” fees stacked on a ticket’s face value already, it would seem that Ticketmaster provides a premium service—yetbarely proves to customers that they deserve them.
Many buyers feel Ticketmaster and StubHub have become bloated and complacent.“If I were running ship at these companies, one urgent task would be to address the image, remind people there’s a human element. Both have probably become a little bit faceless to the general population.”
— Brett Goldberg, founder of TickPick
There’s hope though—Ticketmaster can change. In 2011, they finally introduced the option to choose your own seats with an interactive map, due to pressure from outside competition. However, it would be great to see Ticketmaster take the first step in reestablishing its standard in the ticket market: a redesign worthy enough to keep paper tickets in circulation.
Why bother with paper tickets when we can just download it to our phone or print it out at home?
There’s still something special about the traditional paper ticket. An inkjet print of your favorite band or the World Series ticket from your favorite baseball team will not outlast the durability of a wash-proof-thermal-based-paper ticket. Not everyone has a smartphone and paper tickets don’t run out of batteries.
I. Research
Information Overload
Listen to the ticket—It’s a broken record.
Seat information is repeated three times, however it is only necessary once because one barcode scan will validate entry.
It’s too long to fit in your pants.
Folding is uncomfortable.
Due to its 5.5″ length, the ticket overhangs out of your wallet or purse, requiring you to fold or bend the ticket. However, reducing the size to a business card (3.5″x 2″) would allow it to fit universally.
Printing Limitations and Typography
It would be great to just simply redesign the ticket in Illustrator and call it a day, but that wouldn’t work since Ticketmaster uses on-demand thermal printing.
Direct Thermal Printing is used in commercial products, like barcodes, receipts, and tickets. The paper is embedded with colorless ink, which will appear black when heat is applied. It’s more economical, it doesn’t require ink, and is faster to print.
DEATH TO CAPS: Ticketmaster only uses an all-caps, monospaced typeface—a classic and cheap way to make tickets harder to read due to old printing technology. However, these days, tickets can be thermally printed using proportional spacing and lowercase letters, improving legibility.
Security
Scalping tickets is something that can’t be avoided in the ticket world, and Ticketmaster’s anti-scalping Paperless Ticketing has already pissed people off to create laws against it (Hint hint, we are going to be stuck to paper tickets for a long time).
Currently, consumers can only identify a real Ticketmaster ticket under a UV blacklight. This doesn’t help. Consumers should be able to verify a ticket in visible light. A hologram strip would allow immediate validation. If my €2,40 (Euro) metro ticket has a hologram, there should not be any reason why my $50 ticket is without one.
II. Redesign
Using all of my research considerations, here is my result; a vertical business-card-sized ticket.
Here’s a breakdown of each section of the ticket.
1. Seat Info: Make it big.
Section, row, seat, and admission information should be at the top; it’s the whole point of the ticket really.
2. Red Stripe: Embed a hologram.
The iconic red stripe can stay on the ticket, but to save space, the logo can be embedded into the holographic strip, enhancing security.
3a. Body: Put a face on it.
It gives the ticket a human touch because people are attracted to faces, not coded numbers. It makes each ticket more distinct from each other. Could you imagine if paper money didn’t have a portrait on it?
3b. No more center-aligned text.
This is not a wedding invite or a gravestone, this is live entertainment! Left aligning the content will give it the structure it so desperately needs.
4. Barcode: One ticket, one number.
No more crazy control numbers running around the ticket. Just one number is good enough.
III. Making It Work
Printing in Color is Manageable
As we’ve seen, it is possible to print a color background on thermal paper giving each ticket a separate identity. Printing in color requires more steps, but because Ticketmaster produces their tickets in two centralized printing fulfillment factories, the cost of production is much cheaper.
IV. Show Cool Tickets To The World
This is what you wanted right?
Question for you: If you go to concerts, do you opt for paper, print-out, or electronic tickets? If not paper, do you think paper tickets should be retired out?