Tixato Sketchbook

August 12, 2010

A Better Way to Go Mobile

Here’s an update on how we’re approaching the mobile side of Tixato.

Sean and I spent a goodly amount of time prototyping a native iPhone app for Tixato. We got pretty far. But the more we worked on it, the more we started to wonder: is this the right way to do this?

We don’t need access to the most advanced features of the iPhone, such as the accelerometer, or OpenGL rendering, or things like that. And the stuff we thought we did need from the iPhone — like the ability to create beautiful side-swiping animations — it turns out…we were wrong. You don’t need a native app to do that stuff. We’re living in the age of HTML 5.

After I realized this, the answer became obvious: we should just make this a gorgeous mobile web app. Then anyone with a modern mobile browser can use it, and we don’t have to wait for weeks to see if Apple approves us for the app store, and if we find a bug we can fix it instantly.

Moreover, all those API calls Jesse created for our prototype native app? We still get to use those, because we still need those for a browser-based application.

The only catch to all this is that Sean and I aren’t experts in creating a mobile app, and I don’t want to throw any more work on Jesse’s plate while he’s burning towards the first beta release of everything else.

Solution? Find an expert to lend a hand. Say hello to Jordan Dobson. (@JordanDobson)

We sent Jordan the work we’d done on the prototype app, and he’s begun wailing away on translating that to a super-slick, web-based mobile Tixato. For example, here’s the login screen he recently created out of pure CSS:

Look ma, no images!

You can see some of his previous mobile work on Dribbble:

http://dribbble.com/players/jordandobson

I’m very happy about this adjustment. I think it’s the right way to go.

add a comment Posted by Chris

July 30, 2010

Chroma Tickets is now Tixato!

My friends, there’s this funny place in America called the “United States Patent and Trademark Office”.

It’s a place you should never venture, but if you must venture, be sure to count among your party a Qualified Attorney.

Here we’ve been, working our way through 103-degree heat waves in Baltimore, pushing hard into the final stretch, getting more and more excited about how it’s all shaping up, when we get news from the legal frontline:

“ABORT! Your plan to file a trademark on Chroma Tickets has been derailed!”

[insert sound of screeching tires here]

What you say? We searched the hell out of that name! We didn’t see anything!

Well, what we did not see, the eyes of the Qualified Attorney did. And thus we bumped into a pending trademark for a different-but-apparently-close-enough name, for a different-but-apparently-close-enough kind of product, that is not yet officially a trademark but almost certainly will be, and boy oh boy do I not want to spend our launch party wondering how long it takes before we get sued.

So!

We put on our brainstorming hats, we fired up Domai.nr, and we started the search for a new, better, awesomer name.

It took several weeks and dozens (if not hundreds) of attempts, but finally, FINALLY we have waded through the great jungle of claimed names and discovered a very special one we are now claiming for our own:

Tixato

(“tix-AH-toe”)

I don’t mind telling you, I’m actually pretty happy about this. Consider, for a moment, the following properties of this lovely little word:

It’s available in the holy trifecta of URL forms: tixato.com, tixato.net, and tixato.org
It’s available in the super-sweet short form URL: tixa.to (Hello, Twitter-friendly URLs!)
Speaking of Twitter, it’s available in Twitter form: http://twitter.com/tixato
It’s not a messy two-word name, it’s just “Tixato”. Short, sweet, done.
It’s easy to say.
It’s easy to spell.
It, for lack of a better word, feels right. Like it’s ticketing, but with a little magic sprinkled on top. Possibly from an Italian magician with a really killer moustache.
It, and words spelled like it, appear ZERO times in the trademark database. Zero. No one else is using this name.
No, really, no one else is using this name:

Google search for Tixato

A reminder, I suppose, that constraints simply push us to a better place.

And now, back to work. If I can manage it in this final sprint, I’ll drop you a few screenshots as we come galloping toward the finish line.

Yes, it’s starting out simple. But damn if I don’t think you’re going to like it.

6 comments Posted by Chris

June 1, 2010

“Ok, we’ve sold tickets. Now what?”

Ok, so you’ve sold tickets, your actors know their lines, and the squirrel suits are finished.

The doors are about to open. You’ve sold most of your seats ahead of time, but you’ll still be selling some tickets at the door. Time to pull out that iPhone and get rolling. Here’s one way this might work:

First off, you’ll switch from sales mode to door mode. Picking a performance is exactly the same — slide through the posters and pick a time.

From here, you’ll be able to either to quickly sell tickets as people come in…

…or you can mark patrons as “arrived” when they show up with their ticket info.

If you’re in a huge hurry and you don’t feel like looking up individual tickets, you can just tap the button for the ticket type and send people on their way.

If you do want to check people in individually, though, you can tap the “Collect” button to look up tickets by name, ticket number, or order number. With a single ticket, just click the checkbox to show that they’ve arrived. If you look up an order number, you’ll have the option to mark individual tickets.

But what if your iPhone died yesterday? What if your underground bunker of a theatre is left high and dry by AT&T? Well, there’s always paper. In fact, we’ll generate PDFs for you that list all of your ticket sales for easy crossing off at the door. And we’ll make a PDF for easily tracking sales at the door. Say, something like this:

Would that process work for you, or should we make some adjustments?

11 comments Posted by Jesse Tags: iphone, sales

May 28, 2010

The Pocket Box Office

So Chris mentioned an iPhone app in his last post. We think mobile sales are a big deal, even when you’re talking about cash transactions.

Let’s say you’re in a coffee shop, talking to a friend about your show…

FRIEND: I’ve always wanted to see Our Town performed by people in squirrel suits. Do you have tickets for Friday night?

YOU: I’m pretty sure we do.

(YOU pull out your iPhone.)

YOU: Yep. Fourteen left for the 6 o’clock show, eight for 8pm. Ten bucks each.

FRIEND: Cool. I’ll take two for the eight o’clock.

(FRIEND hands YOU a twenty.)

YOU: You’re all set. You’ll get an email with your ticket and receipt and everything. See you Friday!

That’s it! And if you do have a physical box office, you can still sell tickets using the regular web interface. We also keep a running tally of cash sales by seller, and there’s a way to log deposits to the cash box. (We want to solve your accounting headaches, too.)

Is this something you would find useful? Are we missing critical steps? Where would you sell tickets if you could sell tickets anywhere? Let us know in the comments!

(And thanks to teehan+lax for the iPhone sketch elements.)

add a comment Posted by Jesse Tags: iphone, squirrels

May 25, 2010

In which we emerge from our coding cave

The light! The light! It burns my eyes!

What? Yes! Of course we’re still here!

Okay, fair enough. We disappeared there for a couple of months. Apologies for the disconnection there. You deserve some updates.

Last time, on As the Chroma Turns…

You may recall we’ve been barreling along, tumbling forward on Storyboards, patron tagging, the box office point-of-sale interface, basic discounts, and so on.

Then, two months ago, Jesse, Sean, and I got on a plane (well, strictly speaking Jesse took the train) and met up in glorious Portland Oregon. Where we squeaked about one very awesome meeting with Trisha Mead of Portland Center Stage, and then we fell silent.

So what happened? What the hell is going on?

Well, we piled into that room at Ace Hotel, threw some blues on the record player, and…

…we talked.

And we started with the question: “When can we ship?”

Because, see, we’re all fervently in the “ship early and iterate” camp. Which means we’re getting to that point where we’re feeling anxious about getting something useful out into the world. We think we’ve got some cool stuff here, but it’s all just speculation until someone can actually use it and tell us if it actually, you know, helps.

So we talked about what we’ve built so far. What are the last must-have features before we can start letting people give this a shot? What is the minimum amount of stuff we’d need before Chroma is useful for somebody?

And there we are, talking through everything we’ve made so far, and everything we have left to make, when all of a sudden Jesse says:

Hey guys, this is probably really stupid…. but… do we have to process credit cards in the first version?

And I’ll admit, I kinda looked at him blankly and didn’t say anything, because my initial response was, well, DUH we have to process credit cards. That’s kind of the whole point of Chroma: to help you do online sales.

But in my defense I didn’t say that, and we sat there in silence for a second, and then in the spirit of brainstorming… we started to talk it through.

Fundamentals

Here’s the thing: the whole point of Chroma actually isn’t to help you do online sales. Online sales are going to be critical. Not only for how you sell tickets but for how we sustain Chroma as a company. But the essence of Chroma is not, fundamentally, to process an online sale. The essence of Chroma is to help you get butts in the seats.

What If

What if the first release of Chroma was so simple it didn’t even process online credit cards? Well, it might only be useful to a very small slice of people selling tickets, but that might be okay. (Start small, right?)

What if the first release of Chroma only helped you…what? It still needs to help sell tickets. But how? Well, how about cash sales?

What if Chroma starts by just helping little venues track and process cash sales?

What if only the box office folks will interact with Chroma directly? If we’re not doing credit card processing, I guess there’s no reason for a patron to visit the Chroma website, or interact with a Chroma widget, or anything like that….and that’s a lot of work we don’t have to do for the initial launch.

Okay, so… We’ve already built the infrastructure to let you establish venues, and create events, and schedule shows, and allocate blocks of tickets, and select tickets from a box office point-of-sale interface….

So what would it mean to use all this infrastructure for the basic management of cash sales?

Well, it might mean we almost have something ready to ship.

“Half, not half-assed.” — 37signals

As we sat there in our hotel room, immersed in thoughts of a simplified first launch, I made the following proposal: if we start with just cash sales, we’ve got to do them very well.

Yes, we’ll have this lovely box office in your laptop to track sales and provide reports and stats. But now the tickets are tied to that laptop, and that’s not very flexible. I want to be able to sell some tickets at the bar tonight when I’m talking up the show to my friend and her buddies. I should be able to do that easily.

At which moment all of us looked down at our iPhones.

I’ll tell ya, when you’ve done a lot of programming on OS X, this native iPhone app stuff is a breeze.

Are we crazy?

Okay, so here’s the deal. We think we’re going to take a shot at rolling out this first cash-only version of Chroma soon. There’s still some stuff to do. We’re still working on the graphic design elements with our designer Eric Kass. There are still some missing details, like calculating taxes, figuring out what sales reports we need to have, locking down ticket sales at a certain hour after the show is over, that sort of thing. Sean and I still need to finish up the Chroma iPhone app.

But maybe this is a way for us to get concrete very quickly. Maybe this is a way for us to become useful to a (probably very small) number of people sooner rather than later.

We won’t make it a big, huge, grand announcement. We’ll just open it up. See if anyone finds it useful, and then get back to work on making it better.

I mean, it’s not going to hurt anyone if it’s NOT useful. All of this stuff will be free. The iPhone app will be free, the cash sales processing and reporting will be free, all of it. And it will stay free. So if we roll this out and it doesn’t do anyone any good, hey, no problem! You can at least play with it, and it’ll be out in the world, and it’ll gives us something to build on for the next iteration, and the next, and the next, until we’ve got the credit card processing, and the seating charts, and all the other stuff we want to put in it, but can only do one step at a time.

BUT. If you, or someone you know, actually does just care about cash sales? We need to talk. You need to be part of our beta group and tell us how to make this thing work for you. Seriously. Leave a comment below or email me: chris@figure53.com

In the meantime

We’re going to get back to updating our sketchbook to show you how our iPhone app works. And how it will also serve to let you take tickets at the door. And how we think we’re going to integrate it with Twilio to optionally let Chroma send an SMS reminder to your patron that they bought a ticket for your show that starts in two hours. And, well, maybe it would even be a nice companion to Square?

Enough with the update

That’s my spiel. I think that gets you pretty well filled in on what we’ve been thinking and doing the last two months.

Now, what I’m dying to know is if you have any thoughts about this.

Stupid?

Cool?

Other ideas about what we should be doing instead?

Gimme the shiggy yo! I really want to know what you think about all this.

6 comments Posted by Chris

April 2, 2010

Sales dashboard

It’s fun to sell tickets and all, but what if you actually want to know something about your overall sales numbers? Here’s a quick look at the first version of our sales dashboard. It’s like opening up the cash register, except you don’t have to count all those bills by hand.

We’ll be developing more detailed visualizations (sales per day, and so forth) as well. What would you like to see in this quick view, or in more detailed views?

If you’re interested in the technical details, read on…

Normally, these kinds of updates happen with AJAX polling: the web page sends a request to the web server every, say, 10 seconds, and grabs new data. There are two problem with this. First, it means you only get the latest data when your browser asks for it. Second, it means that every browser with this page open is bombarding our servers with requests.

As it turns out, HTML5 has a new feature called Web Sockets that lets the web server push notifications to the browser when there’s a change. The server part of this is a bit complicated, though. Lucky for us, there’s Pusher App. It’s a really clever service that manages all this automatically, plus they have a fallback technique for using Flash when Web Sockets isn’t available.

“But what about the iPhone and iPad?” you say. For browsers without Web Sockets or Flash, we stick to the usual AJAX polling method. In the screencast, you’ll notice that the iPhone updates after Chrome – that’s because Chrome gets an immediate push update using Web Sockets, but the iPhone doesn’t get the new numbers until it checks in.

In any case: it works!

3 comments Posted by Jesse Tags: box office, stats

March 18, 2010

First pass on discounts

Wherein we show the first draft of simple discount functionality, and a new quick-edit box office receipt:

7 comments Posted by Chris Tags: discounts, point of sale

March 1, 2010

Refining the Sell Button

7 comments Posted by Chris Tags: box office, tickets

February 10, 2010

Patron tagging

More about the patron page! And a question to you!

11 comments Posted by Chris Tags: patron page, patrons

Introducing the Storyboard

Here’s an idea we’re really excited about: the Chroma Storyboard.

The goal here is to capture and communicate the story of the relationship between your theater and a specific patron. When someone calls you, or someone walks up to the box office window, who are they? Have they been coming a long time? Is this their first visit? Did they talk to someone else at length about a question or concern, and if so, what was the gist of that discussion?

The Storyboard is going to help answer those questions. The design is simple and familiar: kind of like a Twitter feed, or a wall on Facebook. We’ll be able to pull the Storyboard into any page that references a patron. It will be the little trail of interactions you’ve had with this patron—the historical context of their relationship with your theater. We think this will help give your patron a more consistent experience, and give you a chance to develop a stronger relationship with them.

Below, Jesse walks you through the first iteration of the Storyboard:

9 comments Posted by Chris Tags: patron page, patrons, storyboard