“Hera” CRM + Ticketing
3min read
Work duration: 6mos
My Role: Sole designer/researcher
Team: Myself, BMOrg executives, funding benefactor
Homepage thumbnail image used with permission,
by Flickr User: ianmackenz
Need: In 2011 the Burning Man festival’s ticketing demand famously exceeded its limited supply of tickets. As a “participatory” event where attendees are the attraction, this created a challenge. Furthermore, scalping emerged as an exploitative workaround—threatening the integrity of an event dependent on a gift economy, and a detachment from “default world” market economy.
Response: Wanting to help and exploding with ideas, I designed the Hera system—in partnership with executives at Burning Man (BOrg). Beyond simply the ticketing problem, Hera also addressed a number of other experiential yet practical needs that come with building, performing, living and exhibiting interactive art in a temporary utopian community of +50k humans, in one of the world’s harshest climates. View PDF deck of completed work
Centering humans: customers, workers, and the business. And, having fun drawing characters.
Communicating the service experience.
Value to customers and workers, of service experience details.
Service needs identified by journey stage.
Design Challenges:
- How to manage “surge” sales with clear expectations management.
- How to curb scalping.
- through binding each ticket to a State issued ID.
- by making ticket transfers an easy DIY process for Burners, to honor how often it’s necessary.
- by also binding social-reputation/relationship information to individual ticket transfer transactions, to introduce minimal friction and surface a scalping-risk score to BMOrg on each transaction.
- Digitize what is currently an analog and cumbersome process (ticketing).
- Paper had been the preference for organizers, both to avoid dependency upon “default world” digital devices and to “gift” attendees with beautifully crafted paper tickets as an event leave-behind. The best of intentions rooted in a love for the arts, overlooking Burner realities and more nuanced BRC survival values cultivated by the same organization.
- Burner behavior in the years leading-up to 2011, demonstrated other ways to embrace technology for Black Rock City (BRC) that could also leave default-world dependencies behind.
- Digitize a host of other self-regulatory, infrastructural requirements that slowly accrued over the years as attendance grew from a few hundred to over 50k attendees.
- Organizers were also not personally responsible for their own (immense!) preparation to attend the event, themselves; so the “paper chase” experience of an attendee, had been out of their sight—and needed elevation, for the BMOrg executives to recognize as burdensome for the most engaged attendees: artists, art-car builders, theme camp organizers, food preparers.
- Including: Department of Mutant Vehicles, Parking passes, Early Arrival passes, managing theme camps, RV sewage service, attendee In Case of Emergency and medical registration, USDA required health permits for camps distributing food.
- How to get all of this built.
- The “surge” sales management component, alone, was a significant and non-trivial technical lift.
- All of the collected PII in the anti-scalping measures added heavier security burdens that surpassed what was reasonable for the internal team of PHP developers to manage.
- With many Silicon Valley luminaries known to be attendees, all of the above felt hard—but far from insurmountable.
Journey/Empathy Map.
Hera’s UI & B2B2C concept presented.
Reputational framework introduced to encourage ticket gifting, to allow ticket selling, and to discourage scalping.
Reputational “Points” system, sketched out.
Demonstrating how the ticket transfer decision tree could work.
Demonstrating the framework in a scenario, from the Sender’s POV.
Demonstrating the framework in a scenario, from the Recipient’s POV.
Outcomes: My work was funded by an independent benefactor—my first entrepreneurial experience, and an eye-opening one. BMOrg explored paths to build the system themselves or through an existing vendor, and the technical challenge of managing surge-events/queuing emerged as too significant (2011) for their in-house team. Two vendors came forward, both interested in building it—but terms were not reached that would have left me comfortable licensing my work for their benefit. I left the completed work in BMOrg’s hands, for them to act upon independently should they ever desire. Everyone involved was wonderful to work with, and it was a fun project.