How harnessing technology at speed is creating an engaging fan experience

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (Rock Hall) is one of the best-known institutions in music, and for a prized few, being inducted to the Hall of Fame is the pinnacle of a music career.

Designing the solution

EY brought together specialized talent from across the firm – including user designers, developers, cloud architects, and cyber experts – to work with Rock Hall in developing a world class solution.

Creating an engaging experience for fans

As one of the most prominent touch points of the Rock Hall brand, it was vital that the user experience be world-class. The EY team designed the functionality to work seamlessly across multiple devices and browsers, giving fans the opportunity to vote by tablet, desktop, or mobile. We also refined the user journey by asking fans to vote before completing their personal profile to minimize drop-off.  Once the vote was submitted, fans were taken to a real-time interactive leader board and by integrating with social media platforms, fans were able to share their vote and build support for their favorite artist.

Verifying each vote

Sometimes, a very passionate fan may try and rig the vote by setting up a bot to vote for their favorite artist over and over again. To tackle the challenge of verifying that each vote was genuine, EY designed email authentication, checked all emails against known blacklists and automatically flagged suspicious votes.

Managing big spikes in voter traffic

Fan vote traffic varies significantly. At the opening of the vote, Rock Hall’s promotion drives huge spikes. While this is foreseeable, Rock Hall can’t predict when the nominees themselves might encourage their fans to vote via their own social media – creating large, unforeseen spikes in traffic. To manage this fluctuating load, EY built the digital platform as a cloud-based solution with servers automatically made available when needed. By only using additional servers when necessary, Rock Hall was able to save on hosting costs with a solution that could be used for future years.

Expanding access through partners

To further expand the reach of the vote, Rock Hall partnered with a leading search partner to embed the fan vote within the search results page – enabling a quick and seamless process for fans to register their support without ever having to leave the search environment. EY and Rock Hall built an integration that fetched the vote data and aggregated it in real time to keep the leaderboard fully accurate.