The London Eye

Like the amazing Samantha Jones once said, “it’s an oldie, but a goodie”.

Picture the scene, it’s 2012, and London has just bathed in the heady delights of the Olympics. Our famous landmarks were there for the whole world to see, and the London Eye was front an centre on the Thames.

With all that free publicity, the London Eye was expecting to cash in on the increase in visitor numbers after the Olympics had ended.

What they hadn’t expected, was for visitors to simply rock up and stand in queues. After all, they had a lush little website you could buy tickets in advance from.

Only it turns out it wasn’t so lush, because while people were visiting it. They weren’t buying from it.

Which is where yours truly comes in, oh, and restaurant menus, but I’ll get on that.
They had a bit of budget left at the end of their financial year and wondered what £5k would get them. Well, let me tell you, I squeezed that budget harder than an a hormonal zit.

First up, I started with what has become a bit of a trademark for me. What on earth was going on with the site? Why weren’t people buying tickets?

I started with a walk through of the site, to get a feel for how it was structured, what things were called, how long it took to get basic info and buy a ticket.
A simple question, but you won’t get a simple answer by looking at just the numbers (as Nike has just found out to their expense).

The analytics will show you patterns in behaviour, but you will need to go and talk to real life humans to find out the what and why.

What the data told me was this (please feel free to chuckle at the stereotyping it showed)

• Italians loved the cupids capsule, for a spot of amore.
• French loved the canapé capsule, for some haute cuisine in the air.
• Germans loved the queue jumping service, for a bit of virtual towels by the pool action (although I’m fairly sure nobody has ever described the Thames as a pool)

Sadly, the tiny budget did not extend to popping over to Paris for a macaron and tête-à-tête, so we settled for the UK. Specifically we chose people in and around Sheffield (while the Eye might be in London, Londoners aren’t really likely to be tourists in their own city).

The lovely people who kindly gave up an hour of their time to share their insights told us:

• What are all these tickets?
• Why do none of them make any sense?
• Why does every page I click on feel like war and peace repeated but doesn’t actually tell me why I should pick that ticket over another?
• How many clicks? FFS.

With the safe knowledge my hunch was right (I mean, c’mon, I am a woman) I could have a conversation with the client. It went a little like this:

Me: So. Your ticket names.
Client: yeah, you can’t touch those
Me: riiiighhht. OK. So. Your e-commerce platform.
Client: also, no.

Baffled, but also loving a good challenge I trundled back to HQ (for the Gen Z, we used to have to leave the office and travel to meetings! I know, total shocker).

I decided to have a play with a little trick I’d learned about how restaurant menus are structured. It uses a soupçon of information architecture and a pinch of behavioural economics.

I sorted the tickets into both implicit and explicit structures. As the queen of tidying, Marie Kondo, says “organise for category, not location” (sage advice, but I was doing it before she made it cool).

So the structure went a little like this:

• Basic tickets with no add-ons
• Tickets with add-ons
• Capsule bookings

And here’s the thing that made all the difference, the tickets were structured lowest to highest price.

You can stop rolling your eyes, this was 12 years ago. The tickets were actually structured with the cheapest ticket second in a list, which is what people were buying.

There was also a bit of a spruce up in terms of the content strategy. A page was removed, and the deeper you went into the content, the more you learned (rather than the same thing at every stage).

That little trick of putting the cheapest ticket first? Meant people were buying the next ticket up which was £3 more.

£3 more, sounds tiny doesn’t it? What if I told you in the first month after putting it live, it netted an extra £1m in sales and reduced the number of people queuing (and therefore complaining) at the attraction itself.

Over the proceeding 12 months, that extra £3pp basket spend turned into an extra 33% in sales.

What I loved about this bit of work

I got to go full nerd and try out something geeky I’d found on Twitter to see if it would work.

The UX department (aka me) got to own a project, to show what UX was capable of doing. I was focused on having some fun, solving the problem and making them some money along the way was an added bonus.

Interesting factoids

Did you know the London Eye shuts down completely once a year? They remove each capsule one at a time to service them.

There's a hatch on the top of each capsule, just in case it breaks down and they need to get rescuers in to get you out. This was more than enough to put me off going on it.

I've worked for the London Eye twice. First time was doing tech support for Tussauds Group (IMHO, the Tussauds wax works studio in Ealing was the best bit), and the second indirectly, while working for their marketing agency.