Event Parking Sales Reporting
PRoviding Upcoming and Post-event Reporting Coverage
Project Completed in 2024
Company Focus in 2024
SpotHero had a strategic goal to scale the events vertical
I wanted to make sure our work on the B2B side making features in the Control Panel contributed to this priority focus. In order to do this, first I made sure we understood the areas of opportunity to improve our event management offerings by:
Auditing the existing tools we have
Doing internal interviews and research to find out where the technical gaps were that cause usage blockers
External qualitative research interviewing our existing and prospective parking operators to find out what their specific needs are related to selling parking for events.
Problems to Solve
Parking operators who sell parking during events had a lack of tools available to them to see what prices sell, how events went in terms of revenue and reservations, and could not easily tell which reservations were attributed to a given event. After an event passed, there was no way to review what was sold for it. Due to a long standing bug with our inventory, the data was hidden well before my time at SpotHero. This was a sore spot for years.
Before this release, the process for operators to get this reporting was to export a list of reservations on the day(s) of the event, manually read through the export and flag which reservations sold at the price they set their event for. They would then add those together to get a revenue number reflective of the event for their own internal reporting. There were operators with a dozen or more events each month doing this with hundreds or even thousands of reservations to parse through. We really wanted to save them the time and effort and surface what they need to know in an automated fashion.
“Why do my events disappear after the event is over? I need to see how it went so I can report on earnings and to prevent customer problems for the next event.”
The Solution
Listing All Past Events
A new reporting experience listing out all of the past events (new!) and linking to advanced reporting for upcoming events as well.
At this stage, the operator can filter by a specific venue, event type, or time period and export it so that they can report their performance in aggregate in the monthly or quarterly internal communications.
The full picture of reservations in a day.
Toggle Between Events on the Same Day
To know how many cars were in the lot that day, operators need to see all types of reservations counted.
Also here they see if they had a blackout, preventing sales for any reason, reducing revenue compared to other similar events.
This helps reduce mental load when a garage sold for multiple events on the same day or had drivers present from transient, airport, or monthly sales, taking up inventory too.
Event Report
Here is the content most important to operators to answer the question “How’d it go?” about the events they sold parking for.
Revenue, reservations, star ratings, and which rates were sold all give them valuable cues as to how to better set up their next events of similar types in both online formats and boots on the ground actions to prevent problems.
This report is available for both past and upcoming events to see what is selling or sold.
Improved Calendar Functionality for Easy Navigation
The calendar had existing bugs and scrolling issues that we resolved. I also made sure that upcoming and past events were differentiated in terms of UI treatment and now each of these events is actually clickable! Wow! We added tracking to this page and found that many operators use this to find their events in the fastest way that makes sense to them.
Future releases will include easier date picking and a “today” indicator that was left out of the legacy feature.
Measuring Success
Qualitatively, this has been a huge success. Still reviewing quantitative results, early signals positive.
Goal: engagement metric of 15% of Event Management page views to view a report. So far, we are just shy of our goal, with 11% of views engaging with the reporting. However, we know that at the time of release (December) and writing this case study (January) that we are in the off-season for many of the events parking is sold for. We expect to review YoY trends with engagement of the entire event management tooling in conjunction with this new reporting to fully understand the success over time.
“This is going to be a game changer in getting more event revenue and operators buying in!”
Upon release, the hype was very real, with many of our internal teams hopping on this right away and discussing events with their operator clients using this shared reporting. We also heard email feedback from operators how helpful this has been and they are eager for our phase 2 release of the project which includes exports.
How did that solution come about?
The full story revealed below
Quickest Win
Copy Updates to Bridge the Usability Gap
Right at the start of discovery, I found that the existing tools were under-used because they were not designed to be intuitive to the user base we have. I watched replays of user sessions, watching people mouse over text trying to decipher what to do and then inputting things with errors because the features were not within the mental models our operators have, especially those new to the platform. We had been hearing for a long time about how offsets, pricing defaults, and pricing tiers were often set up incorrectly and operators struggling to make sense of the features.
These are legacy features that had not been touched in several years and desperately need to be updated to match the current needs in the market. Unfortunately, we did not have the capacity to overhaul all existing features while also improving upon them with new offerings so I offered a solution to identify where people were struggling and give text updates to make it more clear how to use what is there.
I know in general this is a terrible way to overcome lacking design, but this was meant to be the quickest win and a stop-gap until we can address the underlying problems.
Auditing and updated all of the existing feature copy for event management as the fastest way to improve the experience.
After this copy update, we greatly reduced the frequency of negative feedback about offsets, pricing defaults, and pricing tiers not making sense. I know at some point we should improve more here but this proved to be the greatest impact for the least time and effort.
User Research
We heard about some operators who had some questions and others who had some complaints about event management and we decided to speak with them to learn more. I recruited for and facilitated 3 external calls with parking operators with various business sizes.
I prepared a script of questions of various topics related to events. Here are some of the questions I asked:
How far in advance do they set prices for different event types?
What factors contribute to how they set a price?
What does success look like when looking back on events?
What are the biggest challenges they face related to events?
How do they currently report on events? Who are those reports for and for what purposes?
What decisions are they making based on how an event goes?
Other open feedback about their ongoing event sales?
What did I learn?
The biggest gaps in events was around the burden of time they spent preparing reporting of events for their internal stakeholders. They manually tagged hundreds of individual reservations to get what they needed.
There was also a large opportunity to fit reporting into the existing workflow and mental model of price setting for future events. If we show past events and how they went, that would inform if those were good prices or if they were set too high. It also helps give benchmarks to know how much to charge the next time for an annual event or playoffs.
Competitors do it better. I learned through these interviews where some of the gaps were between our offerings and those of competitor tools since they would compare what we show to the other platforms they use. This helped to see how to close competitor gaps to integrate into the solution.
Planning and Prioritization
In order to make sure that our interventions were meaningful and impactful, I themed out a bunch of areas of focus as possibilities that came out of the different interviews and then plotted them on an effort/impact matrix in partnership with my Product Manager. We determined what might be in scope and reasonable to tackle in the time we had.
Opportunity Mapping
Our event parking tools had functionality gaps. It was littered with confusing friction points.
I facilitated an opportunity tree mapping workshop with members of our revenue/sales teams who frequently face frustrated parking operators who are missing the tools and context they need to be successful in their own sales. We mapped out things we could do, laddered up to outcomes and goals.
Idea Themes
We could have intervened in 12 distinct ways to help with the overall “scale events” goal
I grouped all of our ideas from internal interviews, the opportunity tree workshop, and external calls with operators into these 12 different buckets of work that we could do. We knew that we would not be able to tackle everything here but at least we could lay it out and plan for it over the long term.
Effort/IMpact Assessment
Event reporting was what we determined would make the greatest impact within the effort scope we could commit to
I worked with my product manager and engineering manager to help plan priority and prioritization of the 12 themes we found.
Ideation and Solutions
I made a LOT of different things. At first our team thought we should explore some options related to inventory management to see if that might have been the right way to solve the problems of operators not being able to see how events performed, but we realized a more direct report would be more aligned with the needs our operators had. I also explored a number of different data visualizations and trying to tie some of the UI to the event experience for drivers.
This is only a small sample of things I showed to others to get feedback on and I tried a good many more as I explored possibilities.
Validating the Approach
USABILITY TESTING
USABILITY TESTING
Of all of the different options I came up with, how did I verify and validate which would be the most effective at delivering value? Usability testing.
For this project, I conducted 5 usability tests:
3 actual operator users with different business needs, and
2 internal usability tests with those who support operators through getting event reporting every day
I also facilitated many rounds of feedback sessions with designers, product managers, revenue team (sales), leadership, data analysts, and engineers.
I treated these calls as half discovery to validate we were approaching the right problems and pain points and half validating solutions to those problems. I was able to do both since we went into these so well informed from our initial discovery with internal teams and operators.
Key takeaways:
The most important things were revenue, reservations, and driver feedback (like star ratings) so I was able to validate placing those at the top in the most prominent positions on the report
More advanced rate comparisons with the microclimate were not as valuable or important to the operator unless they were really unsure about how to price their event. I decided to remove this section from our release until we could develop a larger rate suggestion strategy in general for events.
Other event concerns outside of reporting were validated as well, returning to those 12 themes we identified before. I asked more about those to feed into future solutions around the event vertical.
Some notes from our external usability testing calls.
Project Blocker
Event Reservation Attribution Logic
Problem: we did not have a distinct and consistent way to attributing an entire reservation to a specific event. Without this, we would have grouped reservations to events in inconsistent ways and also conflict with other reporting.
Our logic included a jumble of various IDs, inventory by 30 minute blocks, and different search sources, prices sold, or overlapping events providing different types of IDs. There was no one ID that would make sure we could attribute reservations to events cleanly, so we needed to involve more people to tidy this up so we could use it.
First I had to lay out what the current back end logic looked like and showing how that would change what is shown to the operator in different scenarios. I made sure everyone understood our options so we could either make a choice with what we had now or make something new.
One proposed option coming out of our discussion, which lead to making the “day overview” page featured above in the solution.
I hosted a couple of workshops and conversations with engineers and product managers to ensure that we were all on the same page about the common goals and outcomes we/operators had. Different squads then became involved to handle some of the back end logic that my team could transform and digest to express in the reporting.
In the end, we did make clear attribution rules so reservations could be consistently categorized, and the operator could see concisely how many reservations were for which events.
Recap
Work Components in Summary
Strategy alignment
Internal stakeholder discovery interviews
External user discovery interviews
Data reviews: feature usage, user paths, actions taken
Opportunity tree mapping
Affinity mapping and idea theming
Effort/impact matrix plotting
Planning project stages (with product management and engineering)
Copy updates (with product marketing)
Ideation session workshops
Designing, iterating, and exploring with low to high fidelity wireframing and task mapping
Facilitation of feedback sessions and async reviews
Usability testing & iterating on the solution from learnings
Back end logic changes (coordination) for real user outcomes
Data visualization in UI
Navigation and information architecture problems solved
Supported go-to-market strategies and training
Marketing assets created for GTM components (emails, pop-up messages)
Facilitated coordination between design, product, engineering, three different squads, data analytics, and product marketing
Informed and got feedback from various stakeholders across departments
Measuring success in both qualitative and quantitative ways
Want to see more?
This was only a snapshot of some of the highlights and nuance of the project.
Be sure to ask about this project when we chat if you want to hear more about my process or about the coordination and collaboration I fostered along the way.