
We Built Interactive Seating Maps Using Raphael; Please Give Us Feedback - jack7890
http://seatgeek.com/event/show/457589/green-bay-packers-at-atlanta-falcons-2010-11-28/
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tdavis
Awesome job guys! A couple notes, from somebody who's done the interactive
seating maps stuff before...

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.

~~~
okeumeni
Yep a direct clone of fansnap.com, Impressive job but I can't help it but
think yuk!

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tibbon
One thing I've always wanted was to be able to 'see' from the seat view, so I
have a better idea of what I'm buying. This is even more important for either
odd shaped venues (Fenway) or buying those ever-tricky, "Limited view" seats
that might be great, or horrid.

A "Seat-View" (like "Google Street View") would change ticket buying forever I
think. Main difficulty is in obtaining the photos, but not impossible.

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sanj
Pay for it.

Seriously -- build an iPhone app that takes pics from seats. Pay people a buck
per pick.

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dprice1
A cognitive issue I had while trying your site was with the seat color coding
scheme. In "deal mode", red is "worst" and green is "best". Black is
"unknown". This makes sense to me. However, some games don't have "deal mode"
(why not?), and so the site moves into a "what's the price" mode.

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".

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pbhjpbhj
I was researching button colouring the other day and contrary to expectation
red is actually normally more clicked on than green (yes, despite the go-stop
metaphor).

Depends of course on specific implementations but might be worth trialling
shades of red down to white (best down to worst).

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lotharbot
1) Bug: occasionally, when I mouse over a section, the box that says "5
listings for $61" goes off the edge of the screen for me. [Windows Vista,
FireFox 4 beta 4]

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.

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jack7890
Thanks for the bug report; we'll fix that shortly. And will also consider ways
we can add more navigation options while still keeping the UI as sparse as
possible...maybe we add those filters but hide them by default?

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svetlins
1\. Great job! The one thing I found missing is zooming in and out with the
mouse wheel.

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 :)

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woodall
I was looking for the zooming too. At least allow me to scroll up and down the
map until that is implemented.

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josegonzalez
You can zoom using the arrow buttons on the top-right of the maps. We
definitely have on double-click and mous wheel zooming on the pipeline.

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gojomo
It's like HipMunk for stadium seats! (Or is HipMunk the SeatGeek of air
travel?)

How many more startups are possible on the theme of creating radically more
interactive and usefully-laid-out interfaces to other sites' transactions?

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kn0thing
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!

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smackfu
This is really cool. I didn't realize all these ticket brokers had affiliate
setups and such good data feeds. I guess those hefty fees allow for it.

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mace
Zooming interface works really well. For example, I like that when zoomed out
tickets of a section are grouped together. But performing is a bit slow with a
cold client-side cache.

Any you particular reason you chose SVG over other alternatives (eg. tiled
bitmaps)?

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ericwaller
Thanks, in regards to the slowness, what browser were you using?

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.

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saturdayplace
The bad deal/great deal scale made me wonder what that calculation is based
on. Is there an explanation somewhere?

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jack7890
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.

~~~
photon_off
First off, amazing stuff.

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.

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hanshasuro
This is an incredible app. Seriously. Well done.

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dustym
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?

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antidaily
Not loading for me - Chrome, OSX.

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ay
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.

~~~
algolicious
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.

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dmix
How did you learn Raphael? The documentation seems a little thin but I'd love
to use it to build some graphs.

~~~
jjcm
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.

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AlexC04
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.

~~~
dminor
SeatGeek is already an affiliate to the larger ticket selling sites (StubHub
et al). This replaces/upgrades their flash version.

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jmarbach
A mobile site is critical for the day-of-event purchases outside the venue!
Either that or a droid app would be great conveniences to an already stellar
product! I like how you took the airline ticket farecast model and applied it
to event tickets. This service is a job well done. I'm impressed.

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gdickie
Very pretty, fun to play with.

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.

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mgeraci
Two UI suggestions:

\- 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.

~~~
ericwaller
Thanks for the suggestions.

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.

~~~
20after4
close it if the click is _not_ a drag?

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davcro
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.

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yellowbkpk
This is great. One small suggestion: when you have data for where seats are
and the user clicks to zoom into the section, show empty circles for seats
that are already purchased. Showing a couple random colored circles inside the
zoom lens is pretty confusing. How far away from the end of the row is the
seat? Or if you don't know where the end of the row is, just to be able to
count how many seats are to either side of me would be helpful.

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wuputah
First: completely, totally awesome. Stubhub was the only interface that came
close to this, and this is way more powerful than that.

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.

~~~
jack7890
Thanks, yeah we've had FBConnect for a while but temporarily deactivated it
last week because it started to act up. Should be back live soon.

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daveambrose
This is incredibly impressive Jack, Russ and team. Excellent job!

Who ended up working on the design? It's very sharp and clean inside the
application.

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thehickmans
What an excellent app, great job!

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?

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ardell
Very cool, very usable.

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?

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spankyc14
Looks awesome. I will definitely use this from now on. A couple questions: 1)
When did you guys release this? I have used SeatGeek before and thought I saw
this awhile ago. 2) How many venues do you have this for? The entire country?

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akmiller
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!

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chasbeen
Well it's brilliantly done. Would like to include it/link it with other stuff
at <http://www.irunmywebsite.com/raphael/raphaelsource.php>

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NYYSI
Do you guys plan on having data as granular as how many seats there are per
row?

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jack7890
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.

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NYYSI
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.

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jack7890
Good point thanks. Have heard this from a few different folks now. We need to
make it more obvious that people should zoom in. Will push a fix soon.

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wilpen
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.

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joeconyers
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.

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wilpen
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.

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mcdowall
Please please please do this for the UK market!

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creade
And maybe NCAA?

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aspir
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.

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josegonzalez
We currently index events and tickets for Concert, Theater, Professional
Sports, and certain collegiate sporting events, as well as things like Nascar
and Tennis.

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endtime
Bug (?): In Opera, my mouse gesture to go back (right click + left) was
captured by the canvas and dragged the stadium.

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dlnovell
Outstanding! I'm going to use the hell out of this for any sports tickets I
buy from now on. Well done!

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aaronzinman
The bi-directional filters on the bottom left cannot be altered in an iPad.

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swah
Tell @DmitryBaranovsk!

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jacki56
Where was this when I was doing my wedding. Cool stuff

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budu3
Awesome job guys

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periferral
looks great! really cool. no ncaaf?

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smitts
agree, college football would be great.

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?

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korch
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.

~~~
ericwaller
Thanks so much, that's awesome to hear.

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.

