Ticket Exchange

[AssEndDawg]

In the thread about tearing down Polk-DeMent Stadium I brought up the idea of a Ticket Exchange and threw out that I would be willing to put some time into it if other people were interested. I thought I would throw together some wire-frames and see if we could tear this idea apart. So here is what I came up with:

Main screen:

I like the idea of being able to limit who the ticket sells to. Bulldog Club would be easy because of the Dog Tags but I'm not sure how the Alumni would work. I mean, they could definitely do it but it could be a bit more involved. Being able to limit would prevent the "why did you sell your ticket to those Alabama ********?" questions the next time you returned to your seats.

Selling a ticket:

Transferring a ticket:

Pretty simple (as it would have to be given the age ranges involved). You would essentially be able to offer any tickets you own for sale. At any time before they actually sell you could reclaim them and use them. Of course after they sell you are out of luck. it would also give you the ability to transfer the tickets to someone else. I'm going out on a limb with the text message but there is no reason you couldn't have some sort of app that would allow you to use a smart phone (we many not have the technology for that yet).

From here the school would just sell the tickets as usual. I've never bought single game tickets though, do they allow you to see all the open seats and choose from a web site? If they did that you could come up with some pretty cool "best seat" logic based on what people pick first out of the available tickets. (That's the kind of crap I can get sucked into for months)

Anyway, just an idea. Feel free to **** all over it.

 

[Todd4State]

I hope Scott likes it.

I mean, if MLB teams are able to do this with more season ticket holders than we have at MSU, MSU should be able to do it.

 

[State82]

you spent that much effort on an idea, woe be it unto me to **** on it. Or anyone else for that matter. I like the idea and have supported something, anything, similar to it for several years. My family is one that has the grandstand tickets and can't always use them. And for that matter, I always sit in the outfield anyway. I would love for the University to be able to sell those seats when not used. You need to send it to Stricklin. Good work.

 

[Maroon Eagle]

[No message]

 

[jcdawgman18]

I think green meaning "not for sale" is counter-intuitive. Green meaning go and red meaning stop are just too engrained in the American mind. Switch them to green=available, red=unavailable and I'm a fan.

The controls software at the place I work has the green=off red=on color scheme, too, and it's definitely taking some getting used to.

 

[AssEndDawg]

There are definitely issues with using green/yellow/red. People recognize them and can relate which is a good thing but far too often they define their own meaning and it can get confusing. In this case I think it's a matter of perspective. This part of the app would be for the ticket seller, not the buyer. So as a seller what am I looking for? Do I still own this ticket, can I reclaim this ticket, or is it too late and the ticket has been resold. Maybe I've locked in too much on this because I've been thinking about it for a while but from that perspective I think the colors work. Green means you can still go to that game, yellow means you would need to take some action to go, red means you are **** out of luck.

On the ticket selling side you would definitely do green as available and red as unavailable. I dunno, is it confusing? If it confuses some of us then the older folks would definitely have some issues with it.

 

[jcdawgman18]

As long as the two screens are very obviously different, that would work well as you just explained.

 

[AssEndDawg]

you spent that much effort on an idea, woe be it unto me to **** on it.

Shitting on a mock up is like fertilizer, it can only make it better. I love being questioned on stuff, it makes the end product much stronger. I have a hard time getting new people in my group at work to understand that the best thing that can happen to us is to have people tear into an early design. That way we get to figure out issues and fix problems <span style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;">BEFORE</span> we have invested tons of very expensive programming hours into the project (or even scrap the project outright if it's looking unfixable). I live by the Mythbusters mantra that "failure is always an option".

Going to Scott with an idea is good and all but going to him with an idea and then a link to his fans/customers discussing it and poking at it is better. I can still think of several potential problems:

Security - always an issue with web apps this is a toss up. With no financial incentive it limits the number of potential attackers but you also have the SEC to think about. First, someone hacking and offering alumni tickets for sale in order to increase tickets available to the opposing team. That could cause a huge headache. Second, people just %#$%@*+ with a hated rival. You can't tell me that if Ole Miss had something like this and it could be used to create a mess / PR snafu for them someone wouldn't want to try it. I think you would have to secure it pretty well.

Gate Issues - someone shows up with what looks like a perfectly valid ticket that a scalper sold to them only to find out that it is a voided barcode (due to transfer or sale). You can't leave that up to the gate staff so you would need to have someone around who can deal with those issues (of course you could pretty much kill off "will call" with the ability to email tickets so maybe this wouldn't increase staffing costs). You would essentially be flooding the, already semi-illegal, scalper market with absolutely perfectly made fake tickets. On the bright side it would probably kill off scalping altogether. It's about time for that practice to die.

Squatters and stallers - You introduce a whole new dynamic into buying season tickets and who knows how it will affect things. You could have people buying tickets that they probably won't use often in order to get the double bump in priority. For example, we have four season tickets for football but sometimes we need more. With this system in place I would be more likely to buy six season tickets so I have the two extras available for the games I want and then exchange them for the priority bump when I don't. On the other hand you might have more fans who buy season tickets now to ensure they get to go to just a few games decide to not buy tickets and use the ticket exchange to buy only the ones they want. No clue what the end result would be other than I know it would means more physical asses in the seats yelling for MSU.