Designing a festival app experience with a digital wallet, interactive artist line-up agenda, and more.
Introduction
Sandbox Festival is an annual music festival hosted on the beaches of El-Gouna, Egypt.
The client needed a mobile app to streamline the management of the festival activities to go hand-in-hand with each visitor’s RFID bracelet. The app was to be used before, during, and after the festival experience.
Client
Nacelle
agency
Ntsal
year
2020
pillars
3 pillars were set to prioritize certain design solutions:
As with any festival, delays and schedule changes are inevitable. Artists don’t always perform on time. The app would need to accomodate flexibility in schedules and notify visitors in case of changes.
Visitors would likely be under the influence as they use the app. Sensitive transactions such as money top-ups and transfers would need extra validation. Data input should be limited altogether.
Visitors would be using the app 3 days a year. There isn’t much time to get to know the app to habituate features. The app has to have clear iconography and clear call-to-actions.
Top-up Process
The top-up process is where the visitor can add more credit to their wallet balance to be able to purchase items or drinks from the festival vendors.
One of the key challenges for this particular feature was the process of trying to limit the amount of accidental topups. An extra zero added could be a huge accident that we wanted to try to avoid altogether.
Line-up
The line-up page features a long list of all the artists set to play at the festival, with easy shortcuts to access the schedule and the users' favorites list.
The visitor can also transfer money, manage cards, report a lost RFID bracelet, or cash out the remaining balance. We added micro-financing features as there were no similar apps in Egypt at the time.
Lineup Schedule timeline
The lineup schedule is a key feature in the Sandbox Festival app. It allows the user to live-track all the artists playing across 3 stages simulatenously on any given day. And also shuffle to see who has been playing before, and who is to play after. It is also easily updateable whenever there is any change in schedule.
The show favorites button, when active, would only display the visitor’s favorite artists and dim the others.
The show favorites button, when active, would only display the visitor’s favorite artists and dim the others.
Results
The App was published in May 2022, two years after it was designed due to a string of Covid cancellations. It was downloaded by 3,000+ visitors and was used throughout the 3-day festival.
The app was later modified and changed by another team for the following year due to a change in management and development team.
