UX Research
Interaction Design
Usability Testing
Visual Design
Prototyping
UM Athletics Tickets
A redesign of the University of Michigan Athletics ticket purchasing experience, focused on simplifying navigation, reducing information overload, and streamlining the path to purchase.
[ Overview ]
Redesigning how fans find and buy tickets for Michigan Athletics.
Background
The University of Michigan Athletic Department oversees 29 varsity sports and generates over $50 million annually from 13 ticketed sports. Their site, MGoBlue.com, is the primary channel for fan engagement and ticket sales, but the experience wasn't keeping up with user expectations.
Role
Working alongside three teammates in partnership with the Michigan Athletics department, I led the design and research to reduce information overload and simplify the path from landing page to purchased ticket.
[ Research ]
Evaluated the existing experience through competitive analysis, a large-scale survey, and user interviews.
Competitive analysis
We analyzed direct, indirect, and analogous competitors to identify design opportunities across six areas: navigation, featured content, user journey, information architecture, filtering, and mobile experience.
Survey
Distributed through the athletic department's email list, the survey gathered insights from 1,200 customers on purchasing behaviors, preferences, and pain points with the current experience.
Importance of information on MGoBlue.com
Interviews
We conducted contextual inquiries with 7 participants selected from survey respondents. The 30-minute sessions surfaced patterns in navigation behavior, feature expectations, and friction points on MGoBlue.com.
"The pages have too much information. It makes me feel distracted and not wanting to engage with it."
"It's hard to find tickets sometimes and the seating tiers are also hard to find so I will just go to Stubhub instead."
"If there weren't so many different links in the navigation, I could probably understand where to find that [specific ticket] better."
[ Challenge ]
How might we simplify the ticket purchasing experience on MGoBlue.com to reduce friction and better connect fans with the events they care about?
29
Varsity sports
13
Ticketed sports
$50M
Annual ticket revenue
The ticket pages were content-heavy and disorganized, creating a complicated and inefficient purchasing experience for fans. Key research findings:
/ 01
Complicated navigation
Users struggled to find the right page for purchasing tickets due to unclear labels and overwhelming dropdown menus.
/ 02
Information overload
Cluttered pages with repeated and unnecessary content slowed down the ticket purchasing process and frustrated users.
/ 03
Poor seat selection and filtering
Users wanted more comprehensive filters and clearer seat availability — closer to what StubHub offers.
/ 04
Missing key features
Event saving, advanced sorting, and accessible promotions were absent despite being common on competitor sites.
[ ideation ]
Translated research insights into personas and mapped the ideal user journey.
Four key themes from research informed four distinct personas, each representing different motivations, frustrations, and levels of technical comfort among Michigan Athletics ticket buyers.
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[ Journey maps ]
Mapped the emotional experience across four user scenarios.
Building on our personas, we created journey maps for each user type to trace the highs and lows of their current experience on MGoBlue.com. This helped us identify the specific moments where friction was highest and prioritize which problems to solve first.
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[ interaction Design ]
Translated research insights into design.
With pain points identified across four user scenarios, we designed around the core user problem. Focusing on landing on the homepage to navigating ticket pages and the event schedule, we explored multiple directions for each before landing on the strongest concept for our personas.
[ Visual Design ]
Creating the design system.
Before creating high-fidelity prototypes, we developed a design library consisting of components, typography, layout spacing, icons, and color schemes. This allowed us to maintain consistency with the current website and brand identity and across the user flows.
Typography
Headings
| Typescale | Size | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| H1 Headline | 35px | Bold |
| H2 Headline | 30px | Bold |
| H3 Headline | 24px | Bold |
| H4 Headline | 18px | Bold |
Body & UI
| Typescale | Size | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Drop down text | 20px | Normal |
| Paragraph text | 16px | Normal |
| Button text | 16px | Bold |
Michigan Athletics
Color
Copied
Main
#1B3A6B
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Copied
Secondary
#FFCB05
Click to copy
Copied
Hover
#00B2E3
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Copied
Paragraph
#181924
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Copied
Grey
#828282
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Spacing
Left & right margins 48px
Header 48px
Section label to title 16px
Section to section 40px
Icon to label 20px
H3 to card 24px
Cards 32px
[ Usability Testing ]
Validated our design decisions with 7 participants across two versions, testing information hierarchy, filter strategy, and iconography.
38%
faster to find tickets in Version B with a 100% task completion rate
66%
of Version A users disliked the event schedule hierarchy
100%
of users preferred the ticket hover dropdown in Version B
[ Final design ]
Here's what changed.
/ 01
Simplified navigation
Tickets were buried in overwhelming dropdown menus. We prioritized tickets in the main nav, condensed dropdowns into two columns with quick-link buttons, and separated login, schedule, and search into a secondary bar.
Before
After
/ 02
Reorganized sport pages
Users found the sport-specific pages overwhelming, with disorganized and repeated information. To streamline the pages and highlight key details, we implemented a card-based layout for ticket options and removed redundant elements.
Before
After
/ 03
Enhanced filtering
Limited filters made it hard to find specific events. To ease the process of finding and comparing events, we installed clear filtering options for sports, location, and time.
Before
After
[ prototype ]
Explore the final design.
Takeaways
Stakeholders know their users
Partnering directly with Michigan Athletics shaped every research decision. Their knowledge of the fan base helped us ask better questions and build something tailored to their audience.
Information hierarchy and organization is key
The biggest usability gains came from small structural changes like repositioning the ticket schedule link and simplifying dropdown labels. The content was never the problem. The organization was.
A/B testing what you can't predict
We had assumptions about which version would win. Testing changed those assumptions on nearly every metric. Running it earlier would have saved iteration cycles.
We delivered a foundation, not a spec
The prototype is a validated direction, not a defined blueprint. The core architecture and layout principles were tested and those should be preserved even as implementation details evolve.
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