OptionIt is a patented, user-friendly platform which lets visitors make reservations for sporting events, with the freedom of reserving now, and deciding later. The proprietary methodology OptionIt owns allows the company to look into future business ventures beyond sports events: options to purchase concert tickets or get the best deals on airline travel are in the works. The joint Limina-Promet Source (Promet) team was responsible for integrating new custom designed features that would simplify the purchasing process (product choice and checkout) while delivering an overall look and feel that would consistently capture the brand’s image and voice throughout all marketing channels.
Drupal was chosen for many reasons on this project. First, it had a very rapid timeline. Drupal was an excellent choice for rapid prototyping and development. Secondly, Drupal was chosen for its ability to customize the ecommerce workflow that Optionit was looking for. They wanted a customized experience that took users through an improved experience when buying tickets. Lastly, Drupal was chosen because the Optionit platform was intended to be user based and provide a “user portal” area. This area would allow users to see their options, modify their team preferences, get notifications of new tickets, as well as provide a secondary market for them to see their options.
1. CHALLENGE
The financial services concept of “primary and secondary markets” were unclear and needed simplifying.
The site’s information architecture was focused on who the company was as an entity rather than focusing on the unique product offering (the option to buy later).
The checkout process was somewhat complicated, resulting in poor usability and thus low purchase numbers. The process needed to become more intuitive.
2. APPROACH
The goal of this joint effort was to identify site deficiencies relating to the uniqueness of the product offering and the brand’s image to better address the product and the overall ‘look and feel’ of the website.
Discovery - Conducted an expert evaluation of OptionIt.com assessing the ‘look and feel’, workflow, interaction, technical architecture, Drupal implementation and performance.
Planning - Created an iterative roadmap that captured plans for adding features and functions, improving the site ‘look and feel’ and performance, adding personalization and employing social media tools.
Requirements & Design - Provided OptionIt team with a set of user experience requirements and technical requirements, workflows, wireframes, and a new online brand identity.
Development - User requirements were translated into custom Drupal modules that would improve the site ‘look and feel’ while enabling an intuitive checkout process.
3. DELIVERY
Restructured the information architecture Cart timer module and provided a fresh new ‘look and feel’ that closely aligned with the company’s brand image and voice.
Implemented an elegant and clean UI that Favorite teams with notifications simplifies product selection and checkout processes.
Introduced a mobile friendly website.
Enforced usability and interaction design principles to bring to life the company’s brand image, consistently communicating it across all aspects of the website, product offering, and marketing material. Built several custom and standard modules within the project’s tight time frame.
Provided Drupal theming, custom web site design, marketing, ecommerce development, and back-end administration support.
4. RESULTS
The redesigned website with new information architecture and UI design increased the site’s traffic by 10x while the site’s load time decreased fivefold. Indeed, the more intuitive, and thus faster, checkout process enabled by the use of more effective sorting and filtering techniques and providing more interactive content throughout the checkout process, offered the customer a more streamlined workflow and more clarity at each step.
Technical specifications
When the OptionIt site was built, it was Drupal 6 so we used what was available and then wrote a lot of custom code to fill in the blanks where modules did not exist to meet business requirements.
VBO and custom admin modules were used to help the administration at OptionIt to administer, organize, and manager over tens of thousands of options. To provide better filtering, searching, and (in the case of VBO) changes to a bulk set of options.
Option selector is a custom module built for a customized portion of the checkout process where they choose the area of a stadium they want tickets.
For the most part, the modules were not created for the project but we had to extend and make additional modules that worked with existing contributions to meet our client's requirements that would not otherwise be able to exist without the custom code.
Limina AO