Hack In The Box

HITB Ticket Management System

Hack In The Box (HITB) organises conference on new security and hacking (InfoSec) related conferences around Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Each conference usually lasts up to a week comprising of technical talks from prominent figures in the computer security industry. Tickets for the event are sold online.

Introduction

A web-app to to create events and sell tickets online
User can access the web-app on desktop or mobile phones, no additional app download required
More than 5,000 attendees expected in the 2019 HITB+ Cyberweek Abu Dhabi event may use this web-app
Convenient for big group: Able to bulk check-in and print attendee badges (up to 200)
Flexible check-in process: Attendees only need to present their QR code upon arrival to the event

Understand: Business Requirements

While it is important to keep up with the growing demands of attendees to the conference, the team are looking to provide a great experience for its conference attendees to:

Purchase and manage tickets (for self, group or as a business entity)
Check-in to the event easily

In addition, it is extremely important for HITB to:

Setup and schedule upcoming events
Manage huge list of attendees and orders at a time
Easily to complete group check-in for large number of attendees at once
Supports wide range of modern devices

Understand: Challenges

One of the biggest hurdle for the project is to anticipate the project scope (on what are essential features) especially when a ticketing platform would need to cater for different type of users and conditions:

Event organiser, event admin
Customers, attendees
Support for multiple countries, currencies and applicables taxes

Such risks are costly especially when additional features (that may not fit within any of the planned modules) are requested by stakeholders during the mid-development.

Define: Project Focus

With the main concerns outlined, I had distilled few key outcomes that will affect the design considerations:

Business outcome(s): Higher amount of satisfied customers (conference goers) due to higher quality of service level provided by the event organiser and improved staff happiness due to increased efficiency in managing customer orders.

User outcome(s): Higher satisfactions from attending the conference with improved ways to purchase and manage conference tickets.

Research: Studying Best Practices

With no prior experience in designing a platform for ticket purchase, the research phase of this project were extremely crucial for me because:

There were established platforms in online ticketing platform (for example: Eventbrite, Peatix)
Avoid re-creating the wheel by understanding the common design patterns for online ticketing platform enabling user to be more confident in using the system.

Example from one of the study conducted observing how a single order with multiple tickets are presented between two different platforms. Such study benefits not only the Design but informed the Development team to study its feasibilities as well.

Another contributing factor to the project success was due to a study on different ticket management platform’s information architecture (IA). This study equipped me with a better understanding on what makes an efficient system for creating and managing events.

Sitemap analysed from other online ticketing platforms

Design: Defining The Foundation

Upon completing a quick study on best practices from other prominent platforms, user stories for Event Organiser/Admin and Event Attendee were reviewed with the stakeholders. This step were extremely crucial at the start of the project to gauge if everyone in the project team were aligned.

Early draft of user stories for the Administrator dashboard (for event organiser) and public website (for attendees)

Once the main user stories were reviewed, sitemaps were visualised to denote what are the navigation items for both Event Organiser/Admin and Event Attendee.