Roles

• Development
• Strategy
• UX

Background

The Hollywood Theatre is a Portland institution. The dedication of the team behind it has turned a once struggling theatre into a thriving community. The website needed a refresh- it hadn't been touched in 5 years. There were obvious technical issues that needed to be addressed, but there were also user interface issues that made the site frustrating to use.

Strategy

Our primary areas of focus in refreshing the website were:

• To make the site responsive.
• To make showtimes and ticket purchase front-and-center. While the other content and functions of the site should be easily accessible, most users are coming to the site to purchase tickets. It's also the case that most ticket purchases happen on-the-fly, hours before the event. So the site should be mobile-first and focused on finding and purchasing tickets and that user path shouldn't be cluttered with other content.
• To improve the ticket flow by leveraging the API of the ticketing company that the theatre uses.
• To improve analytics
• To build a stable, low-maintenance, and secure site.

Ticketing API

In the spirit of theatre's mission, I've released the libraries used to integrate the ticketing system as open source projects. They are available here on GitHub: python-agiletixapi and django-agiletix

Success

We've seen a steady increase in traffic since the site has launched, and have greatly improved the site's SEO. Already we've been able to use the improved analytics to tweak aspects of the site with measurable results. This is one of the most powerful parts of the redesign- the ability to leverage analytics to efficiently improve the site and continue to grow the audience.