PromoterOps is a SaaS application aimed at giving concert promoters a way to manage booking in multiple venues, keep organized and get a leg up on the competition.
Packed with vital scheduling, management and research tools, PromoterOps is a role-based (domain driven) application for people with differing responsibilities – from a booker to administration to manager.
More than just a calendar, PromoterOps provides tools specific to the different jobs with in a promoter’s organization.
There are a number of challenges that need attention when working on a calendaring application. What and how much information can we fit into each cell? How narrow can each cell be and still be effective? How do we communicate event status or flags for a particular entry? What colors can be available to represent concepts like venues, status, warning, etc? How to calendar on the phone?
The way I approached solving all of these issues was to set up some prototypes using Sketch and MarvelApp. It allowed me to experiment with colors, responsive options, key indicators, etc. Through experimentation we discovered the places where we had to consider different options for layouts.
The phone was obvious right out of the gate, and after testing some ideas with users, what we discovered is that on the phone, a calendar view is maybe not the best. What did work was a list of events and dates that the user could apply filters to, allowing the user to quickly see what was happening today and have easy access to event details while on the go (around the venue or around town).
We had a hunch early on that task management would be a great feature to include, but quite frankly didn’t know a lot about for a year or more after launch. When the product was gaining some speed, we found a handful of customers that were either struggling with task management, or had mastered it. This gave us insights on how to design workflows for a solid task management system that allowed team members within a single venue or across multiple venues to document, assign and complete tasks in the context of an event in the venue.
For a promoter, business comes down to whether or not the show can sell tickets. How can we arm the promoter with better intel on an act that he’s never heard of before? Link into a variety of data sources – ones they are looking at anyway like social media – and combine them into a single panel. Effectively, this panel reduces the work needed to be done to get a sense of what the artist’s following looks like.
File management is a feature that a lot of users were’t taking advantage of, but the ones that were found it indispensable. We know because we asked them. Each event in a venue comes with paperwork, contracts, offers and even marketing materials that need a home for future reference, and often needed while on the go the day of the event. We implemented an easy to use basic file system just for that reason. The feedback we got was it was great to have access to the documents in a pinch.