The grounds of a huge airport, and several music, theatre and fashion stages. A campsite, showers and changing rooms. Cinema, museum and discussion club. Beer bars, wine bars, other bars. Extensive car parks, exits and entrances. And over a hundred thousand people hungry for a good time. How do you take care of their smooth logistics? How to check named entrance tickets? How to check vaccination certificates in times of COVID-19 pandemic?

We have created advanced IT tools that make life more efficient for two sides of the festival world.

For the organisers of the Open'er Festival, they offer the possibility of efficient visitor management. The system makes it possible to verify entry rights to the festival grounds and its individual zones. It collects messages coming in from various ticketing systems, updates information in real time on changes to personalities on named tickets, and compares exit and entry data. It also fully automates the health intelligence associated with COVID-19.

Festival visitors, meanwhile, use our system via a mobile app. It makes it easier for them to complete the formalities at the entrance gates, improves navigation around the vast grounds, and allows them to plan their enjoyment of the extensive programme of musical attractions and many additional attractions. If places are limited at an event, our app also comes to the rescue with booking assistance.

When sanitary restrictions were imposed on the organisers of mass events due to the coronavirus pandemic in 2021, it became a condition of participation in the Open'er Festival to fill in a health questionnaire. We fully automated this task. Before entering the festival grounds, each visitor had to answer questions about his or her health in the app. If they showed no symptoms of COVID-19, they received a QR code in the app. In addition to the medical data, hidden in it was information about the validity of the ticket and entitlements in accessing the various zones. Our system managed a collection of tens of thousands of such codes in real time. It generated new ones for arriving visitors, deleted invalid ones and, as the programme progressed, changed the scope of entitlements of those already issued. 

Our digital hub downloaded ticket databases issued by various ticket sellers, updated data in real time in case of return or change of personalities. The software also automatically detected suspicious or abnormal situations to eliminate fraud attempts and tighten the ticketing system.

The biggest challenge was to set up a system that could efficiently handle over a hundred thousand people. Before the most important concerts, we rightly expected huge streams of visitors when thousands of people wanted to enter the festival grounds at the same time. Imagine what would have happened if our system had failed? But nothing like that happened! It worked quickly and reliably, automated many processes, and made life easier for staff and visitors alike. 

But what if someone forgot their phone or lost it? When creating the system, we anticipated many non-standard situations and built solutions for them right away. So we also anticipated that not everyone would want to enter the festival grounds honestly. The system therefore catches abuses, protects against the use of the same QR code by several people and even creates a blacklist of fraudsters.

We started our work from conducting a product discovery workshop with AlterArt, the organizer of Open'er Festival, during which:

• we analyzed current user paths,
• we designed a new purchase flow and registration, related to the need to fill in covidium surveys,
• we identified design risks,
• we identified points of failure in the user's path, e.g. failure to fill in the questionnaire, physical absence of the phone, ticket return in case of illness, etc.
• we identified misuse, e.g., theft of a ticket, passing the QR code to another person, passing the phone, etc.

The next stages of work included:

• UX mockup design for the ticket hab,
• UI design,
• programming and implementation in the store,
• integration with external providers of ticketing systems and scanners,
• support during the event.

• Strategic analysis - searching for solutions
• Lo-fi UX mockups
• Hi-fi UX mockups
• Project management
• Mobile application implementation
• Backend

TWIN .digital collective studio was responsible for UI.