Live Nation Search

Brief

Search is one of the most used features on the Live Nation website, but also one that gets the least amount of attention, historically. As a part of the relaunch of the livenation.com website, we chose to give search a much-needed update for a few different reasons.

1. It's the single most-used feature on the site.
2. It's the top pathway for users to find their desired show when they are not linked directly.
3. It's the greatest driver of conversions for direct site traffic.

Our goals were, as always, first and foremost to sell more tickets. We do that by making the search process fast, by displaying relevant results, and by giving users the tools to narrow their search parameters without making it too difficult to use. Speed and accuracy above all.

During the redesign we aimed to:

• Improve the search results
• Improve the search speed
• Surface results to users sooner (eg. recent & popular searches)

Process

• Research: Search can get really complicated with keyword matched suggestions, a myriad of search refinement options, location variations, and so much more. After taking stock of the current state of our search feature we began comprehensive research of the competitive landscape and paired that with recent findings from our user research team.
• Mobile first: For Live Nation, everything is mobile first. Mobile is over 3/4 of our traffic and the majority of our purchases, so we always start with mobile and then work our way out to larger breakpoints.
• Sketching: Quickly sketching out the core flows of the search process helped us take stock of where there's a clear path, and where there are areas in need of solutioning work.
• Wireframing: This project required less wireframing than most. It didn't require the layered stakeholder approval process that most other portions of the site do. Additionally, most of the complex decisions that needed to be made would be better addressed in through UI work and prototyping.

Understanding Our Capabilities

I first did an extensive competitor/landscape review, testing, screenshotting, and recording scores of search experiences across music, events, booking, e-commerce, and high-profile technology platforms.

Then we started having some technical discussions about what would be possible, what was the best case scenario feature set, and where those two diverged.

We'd selected Algolia as our search platform provider. This provided a lot of great features for us to leverage, number one of course was speed. A close second was extensive weighting and boosting options, which would vastly improve the quality of the results we served up. What we didn't get though was integrated results. We'd have to display our results in silos (ie. Artists, Events, Venues) and wouldn't be able to display an "All" grouping of different result types listed together. While limiting, we didn't view this constraint as a negative for the experience overall.

User-Centric Features

One common feature we observed in our research was that often users were being served some suggested search results even before they type in a single character. We know that one of the most-used feature on our home page is surprisingly the carousel, in part because we often use it to promote the largest, most popular tours on sale at that time. We decided to display some of the most popular events at a given time when a user enters the search experience to leverage the utility of our home page carousel.

We also know that many of our customers, visit an event page multiple times before they actually make a purchase. For users that have recent searches, we chose to display those before they type anything, and prioritized them over the more generic popular events. These additions would improve both the appearance of speed, and the time it took for users to first see search suggestions since these didn't require them to type anything.

Through our UX explorations, we arrived at a design that that would let us display nine results on most modern phones. This meant we could display three artists, three events, and three venues for each search term by default. Because artists are by far the most popular search terms with geo-located events being a distant second and venues a clear third, we listed them in the above order by default.

Ensuring accurate ranking of search results is very important however. Live Nation owns and operates many venues across the country, and it's important that those venues not be buried at the bottom when a user is searching for one. Working closely with our engineering team, we were able to devise a system whereby the best matched category would be brought to the top. For example, if a user searches for "Shoreline" the venues grouping will leap up to the top of the screen, above artists and events, and display "Shoreline Amphitheatre", a Live Nation-owned venue in Mountain View, California.

One other display modification we made to improve the quality of the results we display is to adjust away from the three artists, three events, and three venues format when possible. If for example, a user searches for something like "shirley" which has only one venue match in our system, then those unused two venue suggestion slots are distributed to the other groups. Since the event results for this term are thin as well, those extra two will often shift up to the artist, which would result in five artist suggestions, three events, and one venue. This doesn't happen often, but when it does it maximizes the screen real estate and increases the likelihood that a user will get a relevant search suggestion without having to resort to the search results page.

Full-Featured Search

In the event that a user does need to fall back on the "See All Results" option because they're not finding what they're looking for, we do maintain the grouping hierarchy that was present on the search suggestions screen. If a user has typed a term with very high matches for venues, and goes to the Search Results screen, they will first be dropped on the Venues tab. This maintains consistency with what they were viewing on the previous screen, and also prevents them from being brought to a tab that potentially has no results, if we had placed them on the Artist tab merely because it is usually the most used search grouping.

On the Search Results page we also introduce a "Locations" tab which lists cities related to the search term. It's not often that a user searches for a city name after arriving at our site, but when they do we've found this tab to be very helpful to have.

We also provide a variety of filtering and sorting options, depending on which tab the user is on, to help them narrow down a potentially large number of results.

Results

Post-launch, search has continued to be the most-used feature on the site. We were able to measure marginal improvements in speed, as well as an increase in the number of users that have a successful search without navigating to the search results page. Most notably we also increased the conversion rate through search.

We continue to modify and measure changes in the weighting and boosting of various segments of the search results to improve the accuracy of the results. The next candidate for refinement will be to test the usefulness of the sorting and filtering options, to determine if they are performing as needed, need modification, or aren't providing enough value just justify them.