A guest with no ticket held the lane for eight minutes. Staff took her cash and let her in. Did the cash ever reach the ledger?
Off ledger starts counting. The money left the system and landed nowhere.
Running an event should feel as easy as attending one.
You have stood in this queue. An hour past doors, the line dead, a scanner frozen up front. I rebuilt the Tix Organiser app into the system that runs the gate: sales, check-in, staffing, live numbers.
- Role
- Lead Product Designer, sole designer, every product decision.
- Team
- one designer, three engineers, one PM.
- Timeline
- four months, shipped before Detty December.
- Surface
- iOS, Android, POS.
I turned a scanner into the system that a festival runs on.
Impact
0seconds
Under 60 seconds to admit a guest with no ticket, from 5 to 10 minutes.
0seconds
Roughly 30 seconds per door sale, from a 90-second checkout.
0seconds
Under 3 seconds to validate a ticket, in any light.
0role
One role runs a 20-person crew, from twenty setups.
Context Across this period, ticket buyers on the platform spent ₦884M, then ₦2B. Festivals sell the highest-value tickets on the platform, and this rebuild is what let organisers run them here.
Six solutions the gate never had
Tix Organiser ยท Recorded walkthrough
Auto-playingThe first Organiser app did one thing well: scan a ticket.
Tix could sell a festival ticket in three taps. Then 40,000 people showed up, and everything past the scan had no answer. Staff pocketed cash and wrote names on paper. Past a few hundred guests, organisers put the app away.
The gate was the entry point.
The festivals offer the highest-value tickets available, and fixing the gate was the way to access that tier.
Interviews describe ideal behaviour, not what happens when systems fail under pressure.
So, I worked the doors of twelve Detty December events, a forty-person gallery to festival gates, and watched what a one-feature app forced.
An event staff member arrived an hour late. The manager handed over her own logged-in phone because creating an account would take too long.
One session, two operators. The gate cannot tell them apart.
Asked how the night was going, the manager shouted a guess. Nobody knew the count, the take, or the headroom.
The readout goes dark. Everything above is still true, and nobody can see any of it.
Constraints were the design.
Nigerian events set hard limits. I treated them as the spec.
PaymentCard only
IdentityNamed sale
AuthorityWeb rules
HardwareReaders
NetworkOffline
StateLive sync
CrewTemporary
SettingDark room
ReachAny device
Constraint layer 01
The commercial rules were fixed.
- Payment
- Card only. Cash never enters the app.
- Identity
- Every sale carries a name and email.
- Authority
- Pricing, tiers and capacity stay on the web.
Constraint layer 02
The infrastructure could fail at any moment.
- Hardware
- Different card readers, with typed entry as fallback.
- Network
- Unstable connectivity treated as normal.
- State
- Every entrance stays in sync.
Constraint layer 03
The room dictated the interaction.
- Crew
- Temporary staff with little time to learn.
- Setting
- Loud, dark and high pressure.
- Reach
- The same product on iOS, Android and handheld POS.
Event size changes how staff use the app. The room changes with it.
At a 5,000-person festival, staff specialise: scanners scan, sellers sell. At a gallery, one person does it all. I built one product that splits for a festival and collapses to a single pair of hands.
Small
Under 100 / Community
- Staff behaviour
- one person runs the gate, the sales and the list.
- Attendees
- names known at the door, guest list first.
- Organiser needs
- everything reachable with a thumb, zero setup.
- Product answer
- Simplicity survives every added feature.
Small
Under 100 / Community
one person runs the gate, the sales and the list.
names known at the door, guest list first.
everything reachable with a thumb, zero setup.
Simplicity survives every added feature.
Medium
100 to 500 / Club nights
staff float, scanning for one minute, selling for the next.
steady flow with walk-up spikes at the door.
task switching with zero lost context.
smart tabs, one tap lands on an actionable screen.
Large
500+ guests / Festivals
specialised stations. Scanners scan, sellers sell, managers oversee.
arrive in surges after headline sets, several gates at once.
granular roles across a crew of twenty or more.
role-based permissions, multi-gate sync.
One product, three modes, no forks.
You build an event at a desk.The web is for configuration.
You run into a door at midnight.Mobile is for execution.
Growing from one feature to a full system is how apps bloat. Every candidate feature passed one test before it entered:
Does it happen while the doors are open?
Six did. The rest stayed on the web.
0106
Iteration 01
Outcome
Organizers who once quit the app past a few hundred guests now run festivals on it, door revenue in the same ledger as every online sale.
Music, food and culture
Spotify Greasy Tunes Lagos
LagosWhat the door taught me
I had built for my model of the night before I built for the minute staff were in. Now I prototype against the worst minute first.
Tix Africa ยท Organiser app ยท Closing credits
00:00:48The people behind the product
Tixies
A product built for the minute the doors open.Lead Product Designer
Deji Sokunbi
CEO
Folayemi Agusto
Product Manager
Elo Akabike
Lead Engineer
Kazeem Onisarotu
Engineers