Category Archives: Ticketing

A Very Happy & Open Birthday for the Pen

lisa-pen-table-pic

Today marks the first birthday of our beloved Pen. It’s been an amazing year, filled will many iterations, updates, and above all, visits! Today is a celebration of the Pen, but also of all of our amazing partners whose continued support have helped to make the Pen a reality. So I’d like to start with a special thank you first and foremost to Bloomberg Philanthropies for their generous support of our vision from the start, and to all of our team partners at Sistel Networks, GE, Undercurrent, Local Projects, and Tellart.

Updates

Over the course of the past year, we’ve been hard at work, making the Pen Experience at Cooper Hewitt the best it can be. Right after we launched the Pen, we immediately realized there was quite a bit of work to do behind the scenes so that our Visitor Experience staff could better deal with deploying the Pen, and so that our visitors have the best experience possible.

Here are some highlights:

Redesigning post-purchase touchpoints – We quickly realized that our ticket purchase flow needed to be better. This article goes over how we tried to make improvements so that visitors would have a more streamlined experience at the Visitor Experience desk and afterwards.

Exporting your visits – The idea of “downloading” your data seemed like an obvious necessity. It’s always nice to be able to “get all your stuff.” Aaron built a download tool that archives all the things you collected or created and packages it in a nice browser friendly format. (Affectionately known as parallel-visit)

Improving Back-of-House Interactions – We spent a lot of time behind the visitor services desk trying to understand where the pain points were. This is an ongoing effort, which we have iterated on numerous times over the year, but this post recounts the first major change we made, and it made all the difference.

Collecting all the things – We realized pretty quickly that visitors might want to extend their experience after they’ve visited, or more simply,  save things on our website. So we added the idea of a “shoebox” so that visitors to our website could save objects, just as if they had a Pen and were in our galleries.

Label Writer – In order to deploy and rotate new exhibitions and objects, Sam built an Android-based application that allows our exhibition staff to easily program our NFC based wall labels. This tool means any staff member can walk around with an Android device and reprogram any wall label using our API. Cool!

Improving visitor information with paper – Onboarding new visitors is a critical component. We’ve since iterated on this design, but the basic concept is still there–hand out postcards with visual information about how to use the Pen. It works.

Visual consistency – This has more to do with our collection’s website, but it applies to the Pen as well, in that it helps maintain a consistent look and feel for our visitors during their post visit. This was a major overhaul of the collections website that we think makes things much easier to understand and helps provide a more cohesive experience across all our digital and physical platforms.

Iterating the Post-Visit Experience – Another major improvement to our post-visit end of things. We changed the basic ticket design so that visitors would be more likely to find their way to their stuff, and we redesigned what it looks like when they get there.

Press and hold to save your visit – This is another experimental deployment where we are trying to find out if a new component of our visitor experience is helpful or confusing.

On Exhibitions and Iterations – Sam summarizes the rollout of a major exhibition and the changes we’ve had to make in order to cope with a complex exhibition.

Curating Exhibition Video for Digital Platforms – Lisa makes her Labs debut with this excellent article on how we are changing our video production workflow and what that means when someone collects an object in our galleries that contains video content.

The Big Numbers

Back in August we published some initial numbers. Here are the high level updates.

Here are some of the numbers we reported in August 2015:

  • March 10 to August 10 total number of times the Pen has been distributed – 62,015
  • March 10 to August 10 total objects collected – 1,394,030
  • March 10 to August 10 total visitor-made designs saved – 54,029
  • March 10 to August 10 mean zero collection rate – 26.7%
  • March 10 to August 10 mean time on campus – 99.56 minutes
  • March 10 to August 10 post visit website retrieval rate – 33.8%

And here are the latest numbers from March 10, 2015 through March 9, 2016

  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 total number of times the Pen has been distributed – 154,812
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 total objects collected – 3,972,359
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 total visitor-made designs saved – 122,655
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 mean zero collection rate – 23.8%
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 mean time on campus – 110.63 minutes
  • Feb 25, 2016 to March 9, 2016 post visit website retrieval rate – 28.02%

That last number is interesting. A few weeks ago we added some new code to our backend system to better track this data point. Previously we had relied on Google Analytics to tell us what percentage of visitors access their post visit website, but we found this to be pretty inaccurate. It didn’t account for multiple access to the same visit by multiple users (think social sharing of a visit) and so the number was typically higher than what we thought reflected reality.

So, we are now tracking a visit page’s “first access” in code and storing that value as a timestamp. This means we now have a very accurate picture of our post visit website retrieval rate and we are also able to easily tell how much time there is between the beginning of a visit and the first access of the visit website–currently at about 1 day and 10 hours on average.

The Pen generates a massive amount of data. So, we decided to publish some of the higher level statistics on a public webpage which you can always check in on at https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/stats. This page reports daily and includes a few basic stats including a list of the most popular objects of all time. Yes, it’s the staircase models. They’ve been the frontrunners since we launched.

Those staircase models!

Those staircase models!

As you can see, we are just about to hit the 4 million objects collected mark. This is pretty significant and it means that our visitors on average have used the Pen to collect 26 objects per visit.

But it’s hard to gain a real sense of what’s going on if you just look at the high level numbers, so lets track some things over time. Below is a chart that shows objects collected by day for the last year.

Screen Shot 2016-03-09 at 3.50.36 PM

Objects collected by day since March 10, 2015

On the right you can easily see a big jump. This corresponds with the opening of the exhibition Beauty–Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. It’s partly due to increased visitation following the opening, but what’s really going on here is a heavy use of object bundling. If you follow this blog, you’ll have recently read the post by Sam where he talks about the need to bundle many objects on one tag. This means that when a visitor taps his or her pen on a tag, they very often collect multiple objects. Beauty makes heavy use of this feature, bundling a dozen or so objects per tag in many cases and resulting in a dramatic increase in collected objects per day.

Pen checkouts per day since March 10, 2015

Pen checkouts per day since March 10, 2015

We can easily see that this, is in fact, what is happening if we look at our daily pen checkouts. Here we see a reasonable increase in checkouts following the launch of Beauty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as the number of objects being collected each day.

Screen Shot 2016-03-09 at 11.40.09 PM

Immersion room creations by day since March 10, 2015

Above is a chart that shows how many designs were created in the immersion room each day over the past year. It’s also going to be directly connected to the number of visitors we have, but it’s interesting to see the mass of it along this period of time. The immersion room is one of our more popular interactive installations and it has been on view since we launched. So it’s not a big surprise it has a pretty steady curve to it. Also, keep in mind that this is only representative of “things saved” as we are not tracking the thousands of drawings that visitors make and walk away from.

We can slice and dice the Pen data all we want. I suppose we could take requests. But I have a better idea.

Open Data

Today we are opening up the Pen Data. This means a number of things, so listen closely.

  1. The data we are releasing is an anonymized and obfuscated version of some of the actual data.
  2. If you saved your visit to an account within thirty days of this post (and future data updates) we won’t include your data in this public release.
  3. This data is being licensed under Creative Commons – Attribution, Non-Commercial. This means a company can’t use this data for commercial purposes.
  4. The data we are releasing today is meant to be used in conjunction with out public domain collection metadata or our public API.

The data we are releasing is meant to facilitate the development of an understanding of Cooper Hewitt, its collection and interactive experiences. The idea here is that designers, artists, researchers and data analysts will have easy access to the data generated by the Pen and will be able to analyze  and create data visualizations so that we can better understand the impact our in-gallery technology has on visitors.

We believe there is a lot more going on in our galleries than we might currently understand. Visitors are spending incredible amounts of time at our interactive tables, and have been using the Pen in ways we hadn’t originally thought of. For example, we know that some visitors (children especial) try to collect every single object on view. We call these our treasure hunters. We also know that a percentage of our visitors take a pen and don’t use it to collect anything at all, though they tend to use the stylus end quite a bit. Through careful analysis of this kind of data, we believe that we will be able to begin to uncover new behavior patterns and aspects of “collecting” we haven’t yet discovered.

If you fit this category and are curious enough to take our data for a spin, please get in touch, we’d love to see what you create!

When the optimal interface is paper: improving visitor information

Earlier in this series I wrote about improving customer-facing ticketing touchpoints and UX improvements to a internal-facing app. This 3rd post is about the design and thinking behind a valuable— albeit non-tech— touchpoint: a postcard explaining how to use the pen.

When we first launched the Pen, it was obvious that we needed to quicken up the front desk transaction. One thing that was really slowing down the transactions (and causing a big line) was the “Pen schpiel.” A verbal explanation of what the Pen is, why it’s cool, and how to use it could hog up several minutes per transaction.

a comic-book style grid of photos showing a transaction between two gentlemen step-by-step

I made this storyboard in April 2014 with some willing coworkers and simple props (3D printed pen, fake ticket, fake postcard, fake “sample label,” and fake staff badge). In the last frame, the desk rep references an FAQ postcard.

We predicted the need for a postcard almost a year before the pen launch, but didn’t print one until we were sure it was necessary. I mocked up a fake postcard with a photo of a 3D-printed pen to provide some needed conversation-starting visuals in our early meetings. This was long before the pen had a final form factor, and you can see that our initial conversations about pen size and shape were a little uncomfortable.

person's hand holding up a postcard in an office setting. postcard says "LEARN MORE" with a blue plastic tube-like object.

This was the ‘sample’ postcard in the above storyboard, all created months before the Pen had a final form factor.

The postcard idea was on the back burner for many months as we all focused on the bare essentials of getting the Pen and its suite of services running at a baseline level. Once the Pen was released to the public in March 2015, the length of time of each transaction became an obvious “pain point” that needed our attention. So, the postcard was brought back to the table.

two postcards, shown front and back, with 1-2-3-4 illustrated steps

My first pass (left) used real images. The second pass (right) used illustrations, which were widely preferred by everyone I asked for input.

Sam had a cool idea to let visitors peel up the non-badge part of their ticket and stick it to the card, with some text boldly pointing to your “personal URL.” (The whole ticket is printed on sticker paper). This was clever because it could minimize the possibility of visitors losing or unthinkingly discarding their tickets, which contains the precious personal URL they’ll need to access their personal visit diary. When stuck to a postcard, the ticket might have a better chance of making it safely to a visitor’s home.

I worked closely with the front desk staff to get the language just right. It had to be concise but also explanatory. When the cards arrived from the printer, the desk staff was super excited and hopeful that these cards could help them save time and energy at each transaction.

Informational graphic and text with steps 1-4 under the heading " YOUR PEN = YOUR MUSEUM DIARY"

The first printing of the pen postcard.

When put to the test, these postcards turned out to be less useful than we all imagined.

Only about 2 in 5 visitors wanted to take a postcard. And even the guests who did take a postcard still wanted verbal explanation in addition to the card. (We ended up handling this by diverting the most explanation-hungry visitors to a representative stationed at the nearest interactive table for informal “group tutorials”.)

So the postcard was not a panacea, but it did ease the pain somewhat.

There was an overall feeling from visitors and desk reps that the postcard was too verbose and this is why most guests didn’t want to pick it up and read it. Another point brought up by the desk staff was that while the card functions well as a didactic, it doesn’t sell the pen. It doesn’t tell you why you ought to try it. A third observation: most people were not springing for the cool peel-and-stick feature. Humbug.

a person's hand pulling a postcard out of an acrylic stand which holds a stack of cards. the setting is a darkened lobby.

People are more willing to read a document while they’re waiting in line than when they’ve reached the front desk and are already talking to someone.

So we hit the drawing board again. I created a voting ballot so the front desk staff could weigh in on two choices for the front and back of the card. We had clear winners, as you can see in the image below. The voting sparked a conversation that led to further refinement of the text and images.

two pieces of paper with images and written-in-pen names beside each image.

Desk Reps are always working on their feet or dealing with the public, so the most convenient way to get their imput is an old-fashioned paper ballot (not a web form).

The desk reps were unanimously against “PLAY DESIGNER” as sell copy for the Pen, because they were sure that many guests would think the word “play” meant the message was targeted at kids. So, I came up with 7 copy variations and we did another round of voting. The desk staff almost unanimously voted for a “write-in option” from one of their peers for its directness and clarity. The suggestion was: “EXPLORE AND DESIGN.”

a piece of paper, shown front and back, the first with a grid of images and initials scribbled in pen, and the back with many handwritten notes on a blank page, all in pen

The winning idea was actually a “write-in” contender on the back of the page, which sparked impassioned debate among desk staff.

The voting was not just a method for collecting votes, but also a way to spark conversation among many staff, across departments.

What I learned from this experience is that the folks on the “front lines” tend to dislike any language or collateral that is in any way subtle, abstract, or “overly clever,” citing the likelihood that too much coyness will just confuse visitors. It makes sense; when a visitor is trying to get going in the museum, corral his kids, juggle his bag and coat, get himself to the restroom, keep an eye on the time, and so on, he won’t have a lot of “brain space” for interpreting any subtleties. They just need crystal clear information to get them on their way.

a telephone on museum display with a label beneath, a hand holding a large black wand, and steps 1-4 for use written in blue bold text

These instructions are less detailed, but also less tl;dr

three young people in a museum setting holding large black wands and pressing them to a touchscreen glass tabletop

The new postcard shows real people using the pen, making it visually obvious what a person should do with it.

The second version has:

  • Giant copy to “sell” the pen by describing its basic functions (Create, Collect, Save).
  • Bigger images to catch attention and make the card more “pick-up-able.”
  • Less text to ease tl;dr anxiety.
  • Image and word choice is intended to make the function of the pen’s “tip” and “base” obvious just by looking.

Redesigning Post-Purchase Touchpoints

We re-opened the museum with “minimum viable product” relating to online ticket orders. Visitor-facing touchpoints like confirmation emails, eTicket PDFs and “thank you for your order” webpages were built to be simple and efficient. After putting them to the test with real visitors, room for improvement became obvious.

Here’s how we used staff feedback and designerly observation to iterate and improve upon 3 important touchpoints. The goal of this undertaking was to make things smoother for our front-of-house staff (who turned out to have quite a bit to juggle, given the new Pen and its backend complexities), and simpler for visitors (some of whom were confused by our system.. how dare they!).

The original confirmation webpage was designed with visitors buying on mobile (perhaps even while en route to the museum) in mind:

screen shot of a webpage with order number and a barcode for each ticket.

The original “Thank You” webpage was stripped of information, with the idea of getting you through the front desk transaction as efficiently as possible.

The original confirmation email was a few lines of text:

Screen shot of an email confirming cooper hewitt ticket order

Made in a pre-opening vacuum without real visitors to test upon, The original confirmation email was more self-promotional than it was anticipatory of visitors’ needs.

The original PDF attached to this confirmation email was designed for visitors who like to print things out and have something on paper:

The original eTicket PDF had one page (one "ticket") per visitor. The email went to the purchasing visitor's inbox.

The original eTicket PDF had one page (one “ticket”) per visitor. The email went to the purchasing visitor’s inbox.

Over a few weeks of heavy visitor traffic (with about 20% of visitors buying advance tickets online), I sat behind the front desk staff to quietly observe a handful of transactions every day. I initiated my observation sessions knowing that we needed to make the front desk move smoother and faster, but I didn’t yet know which touchpoints/services/operations would need changing.

These 3 touchpoints stood out to me as something that needed re-addressing if we wanted to make the front desk run more smoothly. (My daily observations also led to many efficiency-boosting changes made to internal tools, IT concerns, staffing needs, signage, and more.) This experience has made me a big believer in quiet observation as a direct route to improving services and systems. “Conference room conjecture” is worth very little compared to real observations and listening-based chats with your public-facing staff.

My advice on Observing and Listening for service design:

  •  You may observe a staff person answer a question incorrectly, or a problem that you could resolve yourself on the spot. Don’t intervene, tempting as it might be! You’re not there to fix problems, you’re there to fix problem patterns. Your mission is long-term.
  • When chatting with staff, listen quietly and attentively. It’s OK if you can’t offer an instant fix. You may not have a magic wand, but listening with empathy is at least half as good.
  • Focus on building trust with the staff you are observing over a period of days or weeks, so they will become comfortable sharing bad news as easily as they share the good. Remind them repeatedly that your intention is to improve their daily work situation.
  • Remember it can be very intimidating to feel “interrogated” or “observed” by someone who is your direct/indirect superior. Make sure they know your questions are motivated by a spirit of service, not by “tattle-telling” to other staff that things might be going amiss. You will get more honesty, and thereby, better design insights.

Here are the observation-based insights that motivated our choices:

  • Visitors sometimes get confused by the barcodes. They think something has to be scanned after their visit in order for their pen diary to get “Saved” or “sent to their email.”
  • Because this collateral is called an “eTicket,” some visitors are marching right up to the gallery entrance with their “eTicket,” and bypassing the front desk. “I already bought my ticket, why do I have to wait on this line?”
  • Visitors don’t know what the Pen is, and explaining it takes several minutes, slowing down the line.
  • Visitors may not have great cell service in our lobby, and probably haven’t gotten the wifi working yet, so if their email attachment hasn’t pre-downloaded, this will slow everything down.
  • Front desk staff each have different ways of handling eTickets. Most staff ask for the order number verbally. A few staff take the printout or phone and scan the barcode, avoiding the need to re-print a ticket (this is how the barcode was intended to be used).
  • The diversity of collateral that visitors may bring to the transaction makes things more complicated for our staff. “Is my customer looking at a webpage, an email, or a PDF? Should I tell them to look for an order number, hand me a barcode, or open the attachment?”
two gentlemen at a large white desk in a dark room full of wood paneling. a third gentleman sits behind the desk.

For their own ease of use, most desk reps were initiating the transaction by asking: “What’s your Order number?” so we designed to accommodate that preference instead of working against it.

The ideas we cycled through:

  • A picture of the Pen with an “enticing” explanation of what it does might help offset the burden on the front desk to explain it all very quickly.
  • We thought one barcode per visitor displayed in a list might let us hold on to our original “paperless dream.” (The “paperless dream” entailed scanning each barcode and pairing immediately with pens, bypassing our CRM and house-printed tickets.) When we ran this idea by our colleagues at the desk, though, we learned quickly that this would be extraordinarily confusing for guests, who need to remember their personal URL (usually printed on the ticket) to access their post-visit diary. What if a group of 5 friends come together, will we put the burden on the visitor to remember which URL goes with which friend? Will they have to write it down, or forward around the ticket email with added whose-URL-is-whose notes? That’s too much of a burden on guests, who are already working to assimilate new information about our Pen, which has already buffeted their expectations (and tried their transaction-length-patience) about what to expect during a museum front desk experience.
printouts of an email confirming tickets with barcodes and giant pen scribbled "x" with handwritten pen notes

What seems like a good idea at your desk may not seem so smart after you’ve shown it around to ground-level users

The current solution (after all, our work is never final):

screen shot of an email with lots of information about cafe, hours, map, the pen, and an image of museum interior and pen usage.

The order number is large and at the top of the email. It’s also in the subject line. Click this image to enlarge.

  • This solution makes the front desk staffer’s job simpler when a pre-order person arrives. It’s all about the order number. There is no more choice involved about whether to ask for the order number, or the barcode, or the purchaser’s name… or….
  • There is still a confirmation webpage, and it looks exactly like this.
  • There is no more PDF attachment to the email.
  • Since this is a “will-call” paradigm instead of an “eTicket” paradigm, we hope this solution will keep visitors from expecting that they can enter the museum directly without talking to a desk attendant first.
  • The order number is in the subject line, so if your email hasn’t fully downloaded, you won’t slow down the line.
  • The original idea was to save paper by allowing a visitor’s PDF to work as their ticket/URL reminder. This idea, though it does now involve reprinting tickets, may involve less user-printouts, since we’re simply asking folks to “bring” their order number, and not any printouts.

This is just one piece of an elaborate service design puzzle. More posts will be coming about other touchpoints we’ve created and re-designed based on observations made in the first months of running our new Pen service.

A new feature you may never see – ticketing follow up emails

A few weeks ago we rolled out a small update to the ticketing website that sends a reminder email to anyone who has purchased tickets in advance.

This is sort of an experiment. but first, some background.

Recently I attended an event at another cultural institution ( which I won’t name ). A few days prior to the event I received a very up-selling reminder email, reminding me of membership discounts and other events I might like. The links within the email took me to the landing page for the event, and offered little actual information that I found useful unless I wanted to buy even more tickets, or combine my purchase with a book in the shop.

To make things worse, on the night of the event, and just as it was finishing up, I received a “follow up email” , which I found really annoying. It was literally timed to send exactly as the event was ending and while I was on my way out the door, as if to say, “wait, come back in and buy the book too!”

In fact, the subject line read “How did I enjoy [insert event title here]?” But, the email itself didn’t offer me a way to answer that question ( even if I wanted to ) and instead simply pointed me to the same landing page of the event I had just attended, along with links to their social media channels and other upcoming shows I might be interested in. The whole thing made me cringe a little as I pressed the delete button on my phone.

I thought to myself, “let’s not do that.”

I really just wanted to send a gentle reminder email, full of actually useful info to people who were planning to come visit the museum. I thought it would be nice if I had booked tickets in advance to get something like this the day before I was planning to visit. Something with a map and some info on how to get here, and potentially a little synopsis of what I might do once I arrived.

So, here was my thought process.

Like I said, it’s an experiment, and so I’m still just sort of beta-testing this feature, and trying to analyze how useful/annoying people find it. We already get so many emails, so I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t bombarding our visitors with additional garbage, or even worse, confusing them with unneeded information like what I’d recently experienced.

First of all, it would be all about timing. While talking out loud in the Labs about this one, Aaron’s comment was simply “time zones.” Computer’s have time zones ( all of ours are set to UTC ), people are in time zones. It was clearly something to consider.

Right now, we can only assume that you will be here sometime during our open hours on the day you purchased the ticket. We don’t presently do timed tickets, and unlike an event space, each day’s “performance” spans the entirety of our hours.

So we decided to try out sending the reminders the day before at 4pm, our time. I guess it’s generally safe to say that visitors are nearing our time zone the day before their visit, but its really still a best guess. Also, we are not going to “remind you” if you are booking for the same day as that’s probably overkill. So for now, at 4pm, the day before your visit, is when the email goes out.

Next I had some fun coming up with a way to extract all the relevant info from our Ticketing CRM ( Tessitura ).

I needed the following info:

  • All the things going on tomorrow ( this is sort of future proofing for when we let you book other things beyond general admission )
  • All the current orders for all the things going on tomorrow.
  • All the email addresses for all the orders for all the things going on tomorrow.

Getting “tomorrow” was pretty easy in PHP.

$datetime = new DateTime(‘tomorrow’);
$tomorrow = $datetime->format(‘Y-m-d’);

4pm EST is 9pm UTC on the same day, so all good there in calculating “tomorrow.”

Our Tessitura API wrapper I mentioned in my last post has a method that lets us get all the “performances” in Tessitura for a given date range. Simply passing it “tomorrow” yields us all the things we are looking for. We also have a method that can get all the orders placed for a given performance. Finally, we have a method that gets the email for the user that placed the order.

Now we can send the actual email.

Obviously, people place multiple orders and buy multiple tickets per order. I really only want to send one email regardless of what you’ve booked. So when I am looping through all the orders, I only add the email address to the list once.

The last step was to make a cron job that runs this script once a day at 4pm. Done!

( Incidentally, all of our servers are set to UTC, but for some reason our RedHat server’s crontab doesn’t seem to care, and somehow ( possibly magically ) thinks it’s on EST. I have yet to figure out why this is, but for now I am just going with it. )

Right now, the email is a fixed template. We are sending out emails via Mandrill, so we get some decent analytics and can track open rates, and click rates. We also added Google Analytics tracking codes to all the links in the email so we can see what people are clicking right in GA.

So far we’ve experienced an open rate of about 75% and a click rate of about 20%, which seems pretty good to me.

Our open and click rate for the last 30 days.

Our open and click rate for the last 30 days.

And here is the GA results for the “Ticket Reminder” campaign from the same time period. From here you can dive deeper into the analytics to see what pages people are heading to once they are on the site, and all sorts of other metrics.

GA TicketReminder

Since you can only really “see” this feature if you book an advance ticket I’ve posted an image of what the email looks like below. We went through a few design iterations to get it to look the way it looks, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. If you were visiting us, and received this email the day before your visit at 4pm, would you find it useful, annoying, or confusing?

Reminder Email Template

Our reminder email template

Of course this will change again when the Pen goes live shortly.

Our new ticketing website

Screenshot 2014-12-16 16.25.03

This past week we launched https://tickets.cooperhewitt.org — a new online ticketing system which leverages our Consitutent Relationship Management application, Tessitura, as its “source of truth.”

It’s a simple application, really. It lets you pick the day you want to come visit us, select the kind of tickets you want to buy, and then you fill out your basic info, plug in your credit card digits and off you go. Moments later you receive an email with PDF versions of your tickets attached.

On the user-facing side of things, it is designed to be as simple as possible. You don’t need to log in, there is no “shopping cart”, and above all, you can do all of this from your phone if you want to skip ahead of the lines this Winter on your first visit back since we closed nearly three years ago.

A little background

The idea to pre-book tickets online came at us from a number of directions. Some time last year we decided to invest in Tessitura to handle all of our CRM needs. Tessitura, if you have never heard of it before, is an enterprise class, battleship that grew out of the Met Opera House and has made its way around the performing arts sector. It’s a great tool if you are looking to centralize everything there is to know about a Constituent. As a museum, it is also appealing in that it does many of the things that non-profit type cultural institutions need to do out of the box.

So, Tessitura. It is now a thing at our museum. Everyone on our staff started ramping up on the software and getting settled into the idea of using Tessitura for one thing or another. Our department began to get requests.

Obviously our membership department would like to use Tessitura to sell and manage memberships. Development would like to use it to manage and collect donations and gifts. Education would like to centralize all public programs, book tours, manage special events, and all of the other crazy things they do. And did I mention we have a museum that sells tickets?

This is how it always starts. The avalanche of ideas, whiteboard sessions, product demos and gentle emails that say things like “When will Tessitura be ready?” begin to pour in. You have to soak it all in and then wring it all out.

The Simplest, Dumbest Thing

Aaron says that quite often. “Just do the simplest, dumbest thing…” and he’s right. Often times you have to boil things down a bit to get to the real core issues at hand. It was clear from the start that this would be an essential part of the “design process” on this project.

So, I started out by asking myself this question:  “What is the most basic thing we want to do with Tessitura?”

I wound up with two clear answers.

  1. We wanted to be able to sell tickets online. Just basic, general admission tickets. Nothing fancy yet.
  2. We eventually want to use Tessitura as our identity provider, and as a way to pair your ticket with the Pen. More on that towards the end…

Tackling Tickets

So to get started, I thought about the challenge of selling a ticket online. I looked at other sites I liked such as StubHub, EventBrite, and other venue websites that I knew used Tessitura like BAM, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the 92Y. I did some research, I bought some tickets, and I asked all my friends who used these sites what they liked and disliked. Eventually I started to find my way gravitating towards the Eventbrite way of doing things. We have been using Eventbrite for a couple of years here at Cooper Hewitt, for the most part as a way to sell tickets to education programs and events.

To tell you the truth, Eventbrite has been a dream come true for us and our sales for these events, both paid and free, have been very good. So, what is Eventbrite doing right? Simply put they’ve made the process of purchasing a ticket to an event online stupidly simple.

I wanted to know more. So, I spent some time and slowly walked myself through the process of booking all kinds of things on Eventbrite. I tried to step through each page in the process, I tried to notice what kind of user feedback I got, and what sort of emails and notifications I got. I tried the same on mobile devices and through their iPhone app. Here are a few takeaways.

  1. You don’t need to register in order to purchase a ticket on Eventbrite.
  2. If you don’t register when making an initial purchase, you can register later and see your purchase history.
  3. As soon as you book your tickets, you get them in an email.
  4. The Thank You page is just as useful when you are logged out as when you are logged in.
  5. Most importantly, you can only buy one thing at a time. In other words, there is no idea of a Shopping Cart.

That last one was pretty huge. Most eCommerce sites are built around the idea that users put items in a cart and then “Checkout.” Eventbrite doesn’t do it this way. Instead, you simply pick the thing you are wanting to attend, select the kinds of tickets you want ( student, senior, etc ) and then put in your credit card info. Once you hit submit, you’ve paid for your tickets and your transaction is complete.

I felt this flow was incredibly powerful and probably one of the reasons Eventbrite was working so well for our education programs. There are simply less chances to change your mind, less confusion over what you are buying, and the end-to-end process of picking something out and paying for it is just so much smaller than the more traditional shopping cart experience.

I began to think of it kind of like the difference between getting your weekly groceries and just picking up a six pack. The behaviors are totally different because you are trying to accomplish two totally different tasks. One is very routine, requires a little creativity and some patience, and a willingness to wander around and “pick.” The other is a strategic strike, designed to get in and get out so you can get home and relax with a nice cold one.

The Eventbrite concept seemed like what we wanted. I had my simplest dumbest thing, and something to model it on.

Technical Challenges

With every new project comes some kind of technical challenge(s). Tessitura is a “new to us” application and our staff at Cooper Hewitt were clearly at the bottom left of a steep learning curve when we started the project. We also had many challenges we knew we were going to have to face because we are a “Governmental Institution.” So things like PCI compliance, complex network configurations, and security scans were all things I was going to need to learn about.

Tessitura comes with two APIs. One is a somewhat older ( as in the first thing they built ) SOAP API, and the other is a newer ( as in still under development ) REST API. Both allow data to get in and out of Tessitura in a variety of forms.

In addition to the standard SOAP and REST APIs, Tessitura has the facility to expose just about anything you can build into an MS SQL Stored Procedure through its API. This is an incredibly powerful feature, which can also be quite dangerous if you think about it.

When I attended the Tessitura Learning Conference & Convention this past summer, it became clear to me that many institutions that use Tessitura are building some kind of API wrapper, or some type of middleware that helps them make sense of it all. We chose to do the same. To accomplish this, I chose to model the API wrapper off our own Collections API, which is a REST-ish API based on Flamework, and uses oAuth2 for authentication. Having this API wrapper allows us to all speak the same language and use the same interface. It is also very, very similar to the Collections API, so among our own staff, it is pretty easy to navigate. The API wrapper, wraps methods from both the Tessitura SOAP and the REST APIs and presents a unified interface to both of them. It doesn’t implement every single API method, and it exposes “new” methods that we have custom built via those Stored Procedures I mentioned.

The Tickets website is a separate project that talks directly to the API. It is also a Flamework project, written primarily in PHP. It uses a MySQL database to store a small amount of local data, but for the most part it is making calls to the API wrapper, which in turn is making calls to either the SOAP or REST Tessitura APIs. Tessitura is the source of truth for most of the things the Ticketing website does.

The Front End

Screenshot 2014-12-16 16.25.44

The Tickets site from the user’s perspective is designed to be extremely simple. I worked with Sam ( our in house front end guru ) to build a responsive, and simple web application that does basically one thing, but the devil is always in the details.

At first glance, all the site does is allow you to select the day you want to come visit us, pick out what kinds of tickets you want, and then fill out your billing info and receive your tickets. It’s basically a calendar and a form and not much more. But like I said, the devil is in the details.

First, Sam built a beautiful calendar like one I’d never seen before. We talked at length about how dumb most website calendars were, and we tried to push things in a new direction. Our calendar starts out by showing you what you most likely are looking for–Today. It displays the next bunch of days up to two weeks worth by default, and if you are looking for a special date, it lets you drop down and navigate around until you find it. On mobile its slightly different in that it doesn’t show you any past dates ( why would you want to book the past? ) and it limits things a little so you’re not as overwhelmed by the interface. We call this “designing for context” and we thought that users might be using their mobile phones to buy a ticket online and jump up to the front of the queue.

Once you’ve selected the date you want, the app loads up the available tickets right below the calendar. You can easily change your mind and pick a different date. From here you just select the type and quantity of each ticket you want. Sam’s code does a bunch of front-end validations to make sure everything you are trying to do makes sense ( you can only purchase a youth ticket with another paid ticket for example ). Between the two of us, we try to do as much validation to what you are selecting as possible, both in Javascript on the front-end and in PHP on the back.

Once you hit Order Now, an order form is generated and displayed. I think its important to note here that nothing has really happened yet in Tessitura-land. We asked Tessitura for some details about the tickets you are interested in, but we haven’t “added them to your cart” or anything like that as of yet.

Screenshot 2014-12-16 16.28.34

You can then fill out your vitals. We ask you to give us your name, email, credit card details and billing address. We store all of this, with the exception of your credit card, in Tessitura. We make you an account, and at this point we send you an activation email which allows you to set up your password at your leisure. If all goes well with your credit card, we build your tickets ( I chose to do all this with FPDF rather than try and use Tessitura’s built in Print at Home server thing ) send them in an email, and then take you to a Thank You Page. You never had to register, or log in, and you technically never do. Your PDF tickets arrive in your inbox and that is technically all you need.

Screenshot 2014-12-16 16.27.35

As a little bonus, we just stick the barcode and some basic metadata about each ticket you bought on the Thank You Page so you can just present your phone at the door. This part is still a little rough and I chose to leave it that way for the time being so we can do some user research in the galleries. It’s a nice feature, but only time will tell if people actually use it or if it needs some finesse.

Screenshot 2014-12-16 16.26.50

Now that you are in the system, you can buy more tickets using the same email address and they will be connected to your same account, even if you still have never logged in. If you do choose to activate your account and login, you can look at your order history, and reprint your tickets if you’ve lost your email copy.

Screenshot 2014-12-16 16.27.10

Tessitura & The Pen

A while back in this blog post, I mentioned that we also wanted to use Tessitura as our identity provider and as a way to pair the ticket you’ve purchased with the pen we’ve handed you. This work is nearly done, but not yet in production. It will go live when our pen is available sometime in early 2015. But, the short story is, when you buy a ticket, either online or in person, we generate a special coded version of your ticket. This code gets paired up with the internal ID of the pen we gave you and that pairing gets stored in a database. What this all amounts to is that when you get home, and you want to see all the cool things you’ve done with your pen, you simply enter the code ( or go to a custom short URL ) on our website. We look up your pairing and are able to connect your Identity ( Tessitura ) with your Visit ( on the Collections site ). But that is all the topic of a future series of blog posts.

Next

Now that the Tickets site is up and running, and we are watching the sales roll in, it’s easy to start thinking of more features and new ways to expand what the site can do. I’ve already started building simple admin tools and have been thinking about building a basic check-in app for off-site events. It’s too early to talk about all of the things we aim to do and how we plan to expand our online sales, but I’m hopeful that we will stay focused and narrow in our approach, offering our users the most elegant visitor experience possible. Or at the very least, the simplest, dumbest thing.