We Built Interactive Seating Maps Using Raphael; Please Give Us Feedback
seatgeek.com
seatgeek.com
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.
A "Seat-View" (like "Google Street View") would change ticket buying forever I think. Main difficulty is in obtaining the photos, but not impossible.
Seriously -- build an iPhone app that takes pics from seats. Pay people a buck per pick.
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".
Depends of course on specific implementations but might be worth trialling shades of red down to white (best down to worst).
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.
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 :)
How many more startups are possible on the theme of creating radically more interactive and usefully-laid-out interfaces to other sites' transactions?
Any you particular reason you chose SVG over other alternatives (eg. tiled bitmaps)?
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.
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.
I came to this thread to find this explanation. Thanks for writing it out. In case you're wondering, the first place I looked for the description was on the legend in the lower right, I expected something to be clickable that would tell me what a "deal" meant. You might want to place the explanation down there. Even a "title" attribute would be a quick win.
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?
One other thing: is there any way to keep the dots from displaying until the map is loaded? It is jarring for me to see them floating out in white space. Yet when the map is cached, the map displays before the dots.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Who ended up working on the design? It's very sharp and clean inside the application.
Have you thought about adding a social angle, i.e. allowing users to make comments on or recommend specific seats? Perhaps another heatmap layer to display desirability?
Personal beef - Rogers Arena in Vancouver is "Seating Chart Pending" with no ETA... coming soon?
Where you could improve: seems rather slow to load on Safari/Mac. Also bothers me that the mouse-over for sections near 333 is off-screen at 1280x960. Could you have it show up on the other side of the pin, just like it does when I click?
Also, it might just be my eyes, but the green highlight on the chart when you are selecting a ticket on the left seems hard to see. Maybe make the outline a bit thicker, or change the gray background to green?
It took TM/LN an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to build their own half-assed interactive seating charts, and yours beats all the big guys. Don't worry about them shamelessly copying your version—they literally won't be able to, even if they wanted to copy it wholesale, trust me(complicated data issues). :P
Incidentally, where'd you get your venue data? I always thought venue seating maps should be publicly available, like open street data.
Collecting the venue data was definitely a bit of a challenge. We used a combination of publicly available seating charts, google earth (believe it or not) and our own transaction data. It's easy enough to get a rough idea of the section sizes/layout. Getting row counts and names was a bit tougher, and our transaction data was a big help there.