Finding a good event on Sympla used to feel like searching through a phone book. Lists were long, generic, and disconnected from what was actually happening in your city. Users scrolled, got overwhelmed, and left without buying.
The problem wasn't a lack of events — Sympla had plenty. The problem was that the platform didn't know how to surface the right ones for the right person at the right moment. And that gap was costing both user engagement and ticket sales.
Discovery & Validation
Research with users and analysis of platform data pointed in the same direction:
User interviews revealed frustration with scrolling through too many irrelevant collections
Data analysis showed high concentration of searches in a few segments per city — music, theater, nightlife — but the interface treated everything equally
Competitive benchmarking confirmed that strong local curation was the key retention driver in event discovery platforms
The insight: users didn't want more events. They wanted the city's best events for them, now.
Solution
We built a new urban discovery experience powered by two underlying systems:
Matrix API combining recommendation, personalization, and search into dynamic city pages
Global Score algorithm ordering sections by engagement and purchase trends in real time
The resulting experience gave each city its own curated identity:
Dynamic sections adapting by theme, subtheme, date, price, and audience availability
SEO-optimized titles and descriptions increasing organic discoverability
Multi-platform rollout across web, responsive, iOS, and Android
The interface stopped showing everything and started showing what mattered.
Testing & Iteration
Usability tests with 10 users validated discoverability of local events — all users completed tasks successfully.
Key validation finding: +23% increase in purchases for events in the next 7 days, with greater accuracy in suggested events confirmed via CES survey.
Post-launch monitoring tracked CSAT and support tickets for 14 days. No regression in existing flows.
Impact
Outcome | Result |
|---|---|
Short-term purchase intent | +23% (events in next 7 days) |
SEO & organic traffic | Strengthened via dynamic city structures |
Monetization | New opportunities created by surfacing top events |
Brand positioning | Sympla established as the reference for "what's happening" in each city |
My Role
I led the end-to-end experience design — from framing the research questions and synthesizing insights, to defining the navigation logic, prototyping, running usability tests, and delivering final multi-platform designs. I worked closely with data, product, and engineering to ensure the Matrix and Global Score systems translated into an experience that felt intuitive, not algorithmic.
What this taught me
Personalization is only as good as the model behind it — but the interface is what users trust. Making algorithmic recommendations feel like human curation required as much design thinking as it did data architecture. The best outcome was that users stopped seeing a list and started seeing their city.
