Awesome job guys! A couple notes, from somebody who's done the interactive seating maps stuff before...
First off, this is essentially a direct clone of Fansnap.com's UI; I'd be surprised if SeatGeek didn't get heat over it. And since Fansnap has taken something like 10 times the funding Seatgeak has, it's not a move I would have personally made. But it sure is ballsy!
Secondly, I created interactive seating maps for TicketStumbler in one day using image maps and JS instead of any fancy (read: quality) canvas/SVG stuff. Turns out that was good enough to get StubHub to ban us from their API without so much as a notice. The ticketing affiliate industry is as shady and predatory as they come; if your product is similar to or better than a "partner" site's, don't think blackmail is beyond them or even outside the norm. All of which is to say, in this industry it pays to spend as little time as possible on features that you may be forced to disable or dumb down. Today, TS' maps are either disabled entirely or reduced in utility, literally to avoid being as good as StubHub's.
Although, with StubHub quickly making themselves irrelevant in the affiliate space by reducing commissions to near-zero, maybe it won't be such a huge deal this time around. Their affiliate manager would contact us the same day we released something StubHub didn't like; no other site has been quite that bad.
All that being said, I really hope Seatgeek does well. It would be amazing to have one honest, successful startup in this space that isn't run by a suit factory.
One thing I've always wanted was to be able to 'see' from the seat view, so I have a better idea of what I'm buying. This is even more important for either odd shaped venues (Fenway) or buying those ever-tricky, "Limited view" seats that might be great, or horrid.
A "Seat-View" (like "Google Street View") would change ticket buying forever I think. Main difficulty is in obtaining the photos, but not impossible.
I found a site that does this this summer when buying Sounders tickets. It has one panoramic seat view per section rather than per seat, but was fairly representative. I wish I could find it again....
A cognitive issue I had while trying your site was with the seat color coding scheme. In "deal mode", red is "worst" and green is "best". Black is "unknown". This makes sense to me. However, some games don't have "deal mode" (why not?), and so the site moves into a "what's the price" mode.
In this latter mode, the cheapest seats are black, the most expensive are red (this makes me think red==bad). Bright green (which to me signals "go!") is smack in the middle. And the cues based on circle size are also gone. I guess I initially assumed that red and green would be the two ends of the spectrum in pricing mode. I found the color coding scheme actually caused me to prefer the mid-priced seats because of a preference to avoid red and black. So, I would suggest a rethink of the coloring scheme in this mode.
It would also be nice if you could show the math on what makes a deal good or bad, or at least have some sort of blurb about what constitutes a "good deal".
I was researching button colouring the other day and contrary to expectation red is actually normally more clicked on than green (yes, despite the go-stop metaphor).
Depends of course on specific implementations but might be worth trialling shades of red down to white (best down to worst).
1) Bug: occasionally, when I mouse over a section, the box that says "5 listings for $61" goes off the edge of the screen for me. [Windows Vista, FireFox 4 beta 4]
2) As a fan of a particular team, I would love to be able to navigate between that team's games without going back to a menu. Maybe have little arrows in the title area next to the team name that say "next home game" and "previous home game".
3) Similarly, on the team list, a checkbox for "home games only" would be nice. I'm not likely to go to away games for my hometown team, but I am likely to want to look through several home games.
Thanks for the bug report; we'll fix that shortly. And will also consider ways we can add more navigation options while still keeping the UI as sparse as possible...maybe we add those filters but hide them by default?
As a Skins season ticket holder and now marketing dude at hipmunk, I'm doubleplus thrilled about this great site. Well done, Seat Geek. Such a universal problem across every single ticket site -- solved!
Zooming interface works really well. For example, I like that when zoomed out tickets of a section are grouped together. But performing is a bit slow with a cold client-side cache.
Any you particular reason you chose SVG over other alternatives (eg. tiled bitmaps)?
Thanks, in regards to the slowness, what browser were you using?
The stadium itself is actually tiled bitmaps, we're using Raphael/svg for the section/row highlights. It would have been great to use vector graphics the whole way, for one it would have given us continuous zooming instead of the predefined levels we're doing now, but the performance just isn't there yet in IE.
We built a model that takes every seat in a stadium and assigns a fitted price to it ("fitted" in the econometric sense, meaning what the price should be for an average game). That's based on long-term historical transaction prices for each section and scaling factors for things like the row, number of tickets, angle to field, and some other inputs.
Then, for each ticket we compare the actual price to the fitted price and look at the deviation as a percentage of the fitted price, i.e. (acutal price - fitted price)/fitted price. The tickets with the biggest deviations are ranked as the best deals.
We certainly need to add an explanation of this to the site; thanks for the suggestion.
This is really cool. It comes at the right time as I'm researching some NFL tickets.
One thing I really, really wish I could do is sort or filter by row # like I can with stubhub. When I go to something expensive like an NFL game, I really don't mind getting an ok or even bad deal if I know I'm getting a great view. It's going to be expensive anyway.
Otherwise, good work. Have you guys seen sites like www.seatdata.com that show photos from sections? Seatdata is rough to use, but sort of indispensable if you are traveling somewhere you've never been to see your team. Is it even legal to use photos like that?
Not sure if original link is direct to seating - but if it is, it does not render on my HTC desire with Android 2.2 and mobile safari. I use Raphael on one of my websites and have similar problem there.
Typically when working in Raphael, I'll just design whatever I need in Inkscape first, then export to SVG. From there just dump the raw SVG data into Raphael and you're good to go.
I was initially shocked when I zoomed in on one of the dots and immediately saw "Bad Deal" ... I thought WTF is this guy trying to lose customers?
But then I thought of how I felt as a customer! And it was good.
It's really a fantastic looking engine really nice. I'm interested in how you're going to use it... a "craigslist" for tickets? Relicense to ticketmaster et. al. ?
Something else?
Whatever - you've built something really cool, now you can figure out how to monetize it.
A mobile site is critical for the day-of-event purchases outside the venue! Either that or a droid app would be great conveniences to an already stellar product! I like how you took the airline ticket farecast model and applied it to event tickets. This service is a job well done. I'm impressed.
Mouseover on the whole section is definitely nicer but unfortunately it caused some performance problems in IE (rendering a ton of paths is slow). Hopefully we can figure out a more performant way of doing that.
One disadvantage of closing the popup on any click is that you might want to drag the map with the popup open, though it would be nice to not have to click the 'x'. Certainly something to consider.
Wow. Great work guys. I am impressed with the data collection, but even more impressed with the attention to detail given to the interface. I love how big circles represent better deals.
This is great. One small suggestion: when you have data for where seats are and the user clicks to zoom into the section, show empty circles for seats that are already purchased. Showing a couple random colored circles inside the zoom lens is pretty confusing. How far away from the end of the row is the seat? Or if you don't know where the end of the row is, just to be able to count how many seats are to either side of me would be helpful.
First: completely, totally awesome. Stubhub was the only interface that came close to this, and this is way more powerful than that.
One suggestion: I wanted to check out the 'price forecast' feature, but had to create a site-specific account, where I immediately stopped. Is Twitter OAuth/FBConnect or OpenID on the horizon? It really lowers the barrier to getting an account created.
[+] [-] tdavis|15 years ago|reply
First off, this is essentially a direct clone of Fansnap.com's UI; I'd be surprised if SeatGeek didn't get heat over it. And since Fansnap has taken something like 10 times the funding Seatgeak has, it's not a move I would have personally made. But it sure is ballsy!
Secondly, I created interactive seating maps for TicketStumbler in one day using image maps and JS instead of any fancy (read: quality) canvas/SVG stuff. Turns out that was good enough to get StubHub to ban us from their API without so much as a notice. The ticketing affiliate industry is as shady and predatory as they come; if your product is similar to or better than a "partner" site's, don't think blackmail is beyond them or even outside the norm. All of which is to say, in this industry it pays to spend as little time as possible on features that you may be forced to disable or dumb down. Today, TS' maps are either disabled entirely or reduced in utility, literally to avoid being as good as StubHub's.
Although, with StubHub quickly making themselves irrelevant in the affiliate space by reducing commissions to near-zero, maybe it won't be such a huge deal this time around. Their affiliate manager would contact us the same day we released something StubHub didn't like; no other site has been quite that bad.
All that being said, I really hope Seatgeek does well. It would be amazing to have one honest, successful startup in this space that isn't run by a suit factory.
[+] [-] okeumeni|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbon|15 years ago|reply
A "Seat-View" (like "Google Street View") would change ticket buying forever I think. Main difficulty is in obtaining the photos, but not impossible.
[+] [-] sanj|15 years ago|reply
Seriously -- build an iPhone app that takes pics from seats. Pay people a buck per pick.
[+] [-] philwelch|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wriq|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jack7890|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dprice1|15 years ago|reply
In this latter mode, the cheapest seats are black, the most expensive are red (this makes me think red==bad). Bright green (which to me signals "go!") is smack in the middle. And the cues based on circle size are also gone. I guess I initially assumed that red and green would be the two ends of the spectrum in pricing mode. I found the color coding scheme actually caused me to prefer the mid-priced seats because of a preference to avoid red and black. So, I would suggest a rethink of the coloring scheme in this mode.
It would also be nice if you could show the math on what makes a deal good or bad, or at least have some sort of blurb about what constitutes a "good deal".
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|15 years ago|reply
Depends of course on specific implementations but might be worth trialling shades of red down to white (best down to worst).
[+] [-] lotharbot|15 years ago|reply
2) As a fan of a particular team, I would love to be able to navigate between that team's games without going back to a menu. Maybe have little arrows in the title area next to the team name that say "next home game" and "previous home game".
3) Similarly, on the team list, a checkbox for "home games only" would be nice. I'm not likely to go to away games for my hometown team, but I am likely to want to look through several home games.
[+] [-] jack7890|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svetlins|15 years ago|reply
2. I'm amazed how ridiculously better this is than the flash version :)
3. Thanks for letting me know about Raphaël - it looks like a very cool tool. I'll definitely toy with it now :)
[+] [-] woodall|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|15 years ago|reply
How many more startups are possible on the theme of creating radically more interactive and usefully-laid-out interfaces to other sites' transactions?
[+] [-] kn0thing|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mace|15 years ago|reply
Any you particular reason you chose SVG over other alternatives (eg. tiled bitmaps)?
[+] [-] ericwaller|15 years ago|reply
The stadium itself is actually tiled bitmaps, we're using Raphael/svg for the section/row highlights. It would have been great to use vector graphics the whole way, for one it would have given us continuous zooming instead of the predefined levels we're doing now, but the performance just isn't there yet in IE.
[+] [-] saturdayplace|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jack7890|15 years ago|reply
Then, for each ticket we compare the actual price to the fitted price and look at the deviation as a percentage of the fitted price, i.e. (acutal price - fitted price)/fitted price. The tickets with the biggest deviations are ranked as the best deals.
We certainly need to add an explanation of this to the site; thanks for the suggestion.
[+] [-] hanshasuro|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustym|15 years ago|reply
One thing I really, really wish I could do is sort or filter by row # like I can with stubhub. When I go to something expensive like an NFL game, I really don't mind getting an ok or even bad deal if I know I'm getting a great view. It's going to be expensive anyway.
Otherwise, good work. Have you guys seen sites like www.seatdata.com that show photos from sections? Seatdata is rough to use, but sort of indispensable if you are traveling somewhere you've never been to see your team. Is it even legal to use photos like that?
[+] [-] antidaily|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ay|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmeredith|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjcm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlievens|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpmcb|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexC04|15 years ago|reply
But then I thought of how I felt as a customer! And it was good.
It's really a fantastic looking engine really nice. I'm interested in how you're going to use it... a "craigslist" for tickets? Relicense to ticketmaster et. al. ?
Something else?
Whatever - you've built something really cool, now you can figure out how to monetize it.
[+] [-] dminor|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmarbach|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdickie|15 years ago|reply
The rollovers are getting chopped off for most of the right side of the map -- they run off the right edge of the page. Can they be pulled in?
At least initially, I was leery of clicking -- but it turned out to stay on the same page, and doesn't have the same problem as the rollovers.
Nice job.
[+] [-] mgeraci|15 years ago|reply
- mouseover the section should display the popup, not just mouseover on the dot
- after a click on the dot, clicking anywhere else should close the popup
In addition, it wasn't immediately clear to me that zooming in would show more detail.
Very cool, great job.
[+] [-] ericwaller|15 years ago|reply
Mouseover on the whole section is definitely nicer but unfortunately it caused some performance problems in IE (rendering a ton of paths is slow). Hopefully we can figure out a more performant way of doing that.
One disadvantage of closing the popup on any click is that you might want to drag the map with the popup open, though it would be nice to not have to click the 'x'. Certainly something to consider.
[+] [-] davcro|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowbkpk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wuputah|15 years ago|reply
One suggestion: I wanted to check out the 'price forecast' feature, but had to create a site-specific account, where I immediately stopped. Is Twitter OAuth/FBConnect or OpenID on the horizon? It really lowers the barrier to getting an account created.
[+] [-] jack7890|15 years ago|reply