Designing a Solution for Designable Tickets

The ability to design, store, and print professional, durable physical tickets is a must-have for event organizers.

The Background

Even with the advent of online ticket sales and digital tickets, physical paper tickets have remained a consistent need.

From coat check and conference lanyards, to receipts and selling tickets onsite, the ability to design, store, and print professional, durable physical tickets is a must-have for event organizers. One of the biggest things about a printed ticket is that it provides a free souvenir of the event. To meet their clients' needs, it is often a baseline requirement for ticketing providers to offer ticket design and print ability.

Is it as simple as buying a printer, though? Not quite.

The Need

A former startup in the ticketing space needed aid with ticket printing. Their system was entirely new in the industry, and as such did not have facilities to support their client's need for printed tickets. They acquired a Boca Thermal Ticket Printer but still needed assistance with getting their printing services up and running.

The startup wanted to partner with an expert in Friendly Ghost Language (FGL), the Boca System's preferred programming language. Boca Systems referred them to Softjourn. Softjourn offers nearly two decades of experience and ticketing domain expertise to clients in the U.S. and Europe, handling the work from its development hubs in the Ukraine and Poland.

The startup licensed Softjourn's one-click Boca printer app, but that was just the beginning. Through various conversations with Softjourn, the startup came to understand that they were lacking in other areas. They eventually contracted Softjourn to develop a ticket template builder.

The Solution

Softjourn developed the template builder as a pluggable web component that could be embedded onto needed pages and integrated with the startup's system. The builder empowered users to create, save, and manage templates.

The template builder offers users a template canvas on which to create their ticket design. If no parameters are initially entered, the canvas is entirely blank. Users can select a specific ticket size from a drop-down selection within the builder.

The canvas is presented as a grid to help with components positioning; the size of the grid is dependent on the printer DPI selection (200 or 300 dpi). As components are moved, they stick to the grid points, ensuring alignment.

When a component is selected, a properties panel is displayed. This allows the user to adjust attributes such as size, rotation, data mapping, and more. The builder offers data field mapping, ensuring the startup's clients could map a specific data set to that component, such as event.name, event.location, price, etc. Or placing a QR code component and mapping it to the ticket barcode data field.

Another example of Softjourn going above and beyond the startup's original need was identifying fonts similar to those Boca itself offers. Licensing the fonts provided a one to one match to internal Boca fonts, maintaining the needed WYSIWYG functionality.

"It would have taken us much more time than it took [Softjourn to develop the ticket template builder]," the staff product manager said. "It really helped to save time from that perspective.

"Our customers tend to have a lot of templates that they use over and over again," they continued. "This builder will enable them to create different templates much more easily for their events, as well as have a standard template for use all the time."

The Benefits

In the end, the startup received much more than they were initially looking for. From a one-click printing app to a ticket template designer, they were completely outfitted with just about everything they'd need to meet their client's need for printing tickets. Softjourn provided full knowledge and guidance based on their almost 20 years of experience developing solutions for the ticketing industry.

"The communication between our teams was pretty good," the client said. "[Softjourn] was super responsive. They solved questions and issues; a lot of the communication was through Slack, and I never saw anything waiting for too long.

"Overall, we were impressed with the functionality and [Softjourn's] transparency. Everything was delivered according to schedule. We certainly recommend Softjourn."