Tessitura Roving Box Office tablets take the sales to the people.
Tessitura Roving Box Office (TRBO) was developed to solve a certain problem, long ticket lines at admissions-based attractions. Developed over a three-year period and just launched, it’s now being expanded to solve even more problems with additional functionality.
“That’s the beauty of software development,” said Dave Aholt, Tessitura developer. “You don’t become a developer if you don’t like that every day is a new challenge. The fun of our job is we don’t know how to do the next thing. We learn as we go.”
The challenge with TRBO was to better utilize the small lobby space at museums and attractions, which often have ticket lines out the door. To move the volume through, TRBO allows agents to move into the lobby and sell tickets at multiple points. Essentially, a sales point can be set up instantly and anywhere.
TRBO Version 1 can sell general admissions and memberships and take contributions on a mobile device. It has a quick-sale screen now, but a newer version will include a historical sales order window. TRBO will generate a receipt on a continuous, belt-mounted feed receipt printer and will deliver tickets, printed there or delivered by email. “Once you’ve moved into mobile you are in the realm of electronic delivery. You walk right over and get scanned in for admission,” Aholt said.
It would seem intuitive that the more functionality, the better, but there is value in streamlining something you do to single purpose to keep the training levels low and the barrier of entry low for operators, he added, “and then build on that slowly.”
“Like so many other things we do, when we start to build them, whatever we’re targeting as our solution, you can imagine the use cases for other types of venues,” Aholt said. “I came from an opera company IT department in St. Louis, and it’s a whole different model than a lobby for an attraction, but I can already see if we had had TRBO when I was there it would have been fantastic, not just for ticketing but to help your advancement team do membership sales or go into a preshow picnic area. You aim for a need but then so much comes out of it.”
Development starts with heavy conceptualizing, including input from experts in the company, key people in the organization and Tessitura’s board of advisors. “One big advantage of Tessitura across the board is how much of our staff started in the arts. It’s like cheating. You have all this institutional knowledge you can tap into,” Aholt said.
The coders then walk through the task from a technical perspective and time-block it, “what will it cost in time to come up with the feature set we’re working toward,” Aholt described. “And then you have to work backwards from when you need to release the product. You want the most feature-rich product you can deliver on time. That’s how we define the scope.”
TRBO represented some differences in hardware for Tessitura. “We’ve been in the desktop application business for some time. We have a lot of experience in web transactions. But our team had never tackled the tablet. From a technical standpoint, code is code, but it’s the paradigms that change.”
Desktop paradigms are defined by the industry; mobile paradigms are defined by the users, he explained. “People want to use these devices in certain ways. Even I have strong opinions about how I want my devices to work.”
TRBO is now in the early adoption phase and already the feedback is coming in from the field, including tweaks to the credit card model, which was set up for swipes. “We realized early people were interested in authorization and any other method they wanted, so we added that after the beta process,” Aholt continued.
With mobile development, “you tend to stay as thin as possible with the code, so it does lend itself to being agile. We’re already looking forward to Version 2. Version 1 is old news the day it comes out,” Aholt said.
One idea is extending TRBO to include seat maps and targeting specific seating, so it works for reserved seating just as the desktop version of Tessitura does, not just admissions. And because it’s mobile, it’s easier to take it off-site to gala events.
“We try to keep it as flexible as possible and not make too many decisions on how you are going to use the product,” Aholt said. “The most valuable person for feedback on TRBO might be the person selling the ticket. Now you’ve played with it we want to hear from you so we can target that in Version 2.”