Overview

SeatsZa is a ticket resale platform connecting buyers and sellers for live events worldwide — football, Formula 1, rugby, and more. Existing platforms in the space felt opaque, stressful, and visually outdated. Buyers were abandoning carts because they weren't sure if listings were legitimate or fairly priced.

My mandate was to design a landing page and core browsing experience that immediately communicated trust, excitement, and global reach — turning first-time visitors into confident buyers.

The Problem

Three core problems emerged from stakeholder workshops and competitive analysis:

• No trust signals — Buyers couldn't verify sellers or assess listing legitimacy, leading to high cart abandonment.

• Poor discoverability — Events were hard to find without knowing exact names. Sport and date browsing had no clear entry point.

• Outdated visual language — The existing design felt generic and low-energy, failing to reflect the excitement of live events.

Research & Insights

I conducted 12 user interviews and 3 contextual inquiry sessions with live event attendees. Three insights shaped everything that followed:

• Trust is visual before it is informational — Users form a trust opinion in under 3 seconds. Design polish directly correlates with perceived legitimacy.

• Browsing beats searching — 70% of users arrived without a specific event in mind. Trending events and sport category browsing were far more common than search.

• Price anchoring reduces abandonment — Showing a starting price ("from $99") rather than a range removed the biggest hesitation point.

Design Process

I followed a double-diamond process: competitive audit of 8 platforms, affinity mapping of 80+ research observations into personas and HMW statements, a 2-day design sprint with 3 hero layout directions, high-fidelity prototyping in Figma, and usability testing via Maze with 8 participants across 3 iteration rounds.

Key Design Decisions

• Dark cinematic hero with multi-sport athlete photography — signals premium quality instantly.

• Trending Events section as the primary discovery mechanism, not search-first.

• Starting price card ("$ 99.9") instead of a range to reduce decision anxiety.

• Full-bleed sport category tiles — photo-driven navigation that triggers emotional recall.

• Trust pillar section placed strategically above the newsletter — exactly where users make the sign-up decision.

Outcome

Browse-to-click rate increased by 38%. Trust perception score reached 4.4/5 in post-launch surveys. Session depth increased by 2.4 pages on average. Newsletter sign-up rate hit 6.2% — over 3× the industry average for marketplace platforms.