Zooming in is awesome. Default map view is a little weird. Slider could be a tad more responsive.(could be chrome)
Overall much better than your last version.
Zooming would be even more awesome if the symbols (+ -) were not covered by the info bubble on certain seats. For example, Shea Stadium section 325. The map is fun.
I think this is awesome. If you could allow me to zoom in and out via the scroll-wheel on the mouse (or maybe double-clicking in an area) that would be really great! I will definitely be using this for all my future ticket needs!
I used to be a developer at Ticketmaster, and all I can say is kudos, great job!
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.
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.
Typically when working in Raphael, I'll just design whatever I need in Inkscape first, then export to SVG. From there just dump the raw SVG data into Raphael and you're good to go.
We built a model that takes every seat in a stadium and assigns a fitted price to it ("fitted" in the econometric sense, meaning what the price should be for an average game). That's based on long-term historical transaction prices for each section and scaling factors for things like the row, number of tickets, angle to field, and some other inputs.
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.
Wheres the hand icon that lets you know you can drag the map for a better view? The tags at the end were cut off and it took me a second to realize I could drag the map.
Not sure if original link is direct to seating - but if it is, it does not render on my HTC desire with Android 2.2 and mobile safari. I use Raphael on one of my websites and have similar problem there.
Doesn't work on my Droid with 2.2 either. I loaded it twice, over twelve hours apart, from different locations. Just shows a gray rectangle where the tickets should be (after showing the loading animated gif for several painful seconds) and a white area where the stadium should be. Works fine on Firefox. I think it is important to support mobile - at work, one may rather not have their employer know that they are spending time looking for tickets. Hopefully it is possible to give a good experience. The chrome takes up most of the display in landscape mode, though when I rotate to portrait, there is much more space.
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.
Probably not. It's extremely labor-intensive to collect and arguably not very useful because most tickets listed on the secondary market don't include the seat number.
Also, I agree that it needs to be made more obvious that the "dots" appear in rows as you zoom in. Also, making the zoom work with the scroll wheel on a mouse would be key.
I was initially shocked when I zoomed in on one of the dots and immediately saw "Bad Deal" ... I thought WTF is this guy trying to lose customers?
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.
As a Skins season ticket holder and now marketing dude at hipmunk, I'm doubleplus thrilled about this great site. Well done, Seat Geek. Such a universal problem across every single ticket site -- solved!
Ditto on NCAA. There's many more stadiums, and college ticket trading is huge business. I guess concert venues could work as well. Pretty much anything with seats and tickets.
We currently index events and tickets for Concert, Theater, Professional Sports, and certain collegiate sporting events, as well as things like Nascar and Tennis.
This is really cool. It comes at the right time as I'm researching some NFL tickets.
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?
Wow. Great work guys. I am impressed with the data collection, but even more impressed with the attention to detail given to the interface. I love how big circles represent better deals.
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?
80 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadIt 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.
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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
How many more startups are possible on the theme of creating radically more interactive and usefully-laid-out interfaces to other sites' transactions?
Who ended up working on the design? It's very sharp and clean inside the application.
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?
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?