CASE STUDY
Nightlife event management, for promoters and door staff
An event app for the two people who run a night: the promoter selling it and the staff on the door.
THE PROBLEM
TheMove Pro is a nightlife management app for Lagos, for the people running the night rather than the guests: creating the event, managing table reservations and the guestlist, and checking people in at the door.
THE DECISIONS
Each decision, why I made it, and what it cost.
Promoters plan over days. Door staff need to get through the next four hours. They need different screens.
The promoter home leads with upcoming events and quick actions. The staff home opens on tonight's event, with Scan Tickets as the main button.
Promoters publish from a phone, often between other jobs, so creating an event has to fit in one sitting.
Name, date and time, venue, description and a banner, on one scrolling screen. The listing starts simple, and the rest of the night is managed from reservations and the guestlist.
Signal in a packed venue is unreliable, and the queue cannot wait for it.
Tickets are checked live with the server. If the connection drops, the scanner falls back to a cached guestlist and syncs later, and the screen tells staff how it works.
Door staff hold the phone at an angle, in the dark, with a guest in front of them. They will not read a sentence.
Each scan ends in a full screen overlay, access granted or access denied, with a colour and an icon. A denied ticket offers Manual Verify, so staff have a next step.
A VIP table is booked on how many people it holds and what they will spend.
Each table card shows its section, seats and minimum spend in naira, with one Reserve Table button. There is no photo of the table, so the section name does the describing.
The app is used in dark rooms, where a bright screen is uncomfortable.
A near black background, with cyan for scanning and anything live, and magenta for booking actions like Reserve Table.
THE FLOW
Online and offline follow the same path.
The staff home opens on tonight's event, with Scan Tickets as the main button.
The ticket is checked live against the server.
The ticket is checked against the guestlist cached on the phone, and the scan is queued.
Access granted or access denied, in one phrase and one colour, readable at arm's length in the dark. Then straight back to the scanner.
Queued scans upload on their own, so the promoter's numbers catch up without anyone at the door doing anything.
HOW I WOULD TEST IT
TheMove Pro was designed in Figma and has not been tested at a real door yet. These are the tests a first round would run, and what each result would change.
Run the scan flow on an Android phone at low brightness in a dim room, with the phone held at an angle, and time how long each answer takes to register.
If people lean in to read it, the overlay needs larger type or a shape as well as the colour.
Switch the network off halfway through a queue of mock tickets and watch whether staff carry on or stop to ask what happened.
If they stop, the offline indicator is reading as an error and needs calmer wording.
Time a promoter creating an event on a phone, standing up, with one interruption.
If it takes more than a few minutes, the create screen needs fewer fields before publish.
THE DESIGN SYSTEM
Near black, white text, and two accent colours with fixed meanings.
One sans, weight doing the hierarchy
One sans family for both roles. Bold for event names, regular for instructions, smaller muted text for secondary details.
HOW IT WAS DESIGNED
THE OUTCOME
