A Teen Friendly App

Urban Gateways is a nonprofit organization that engages young people in art experiences to inspire creativity and impact social change. Teen Arts Pass (TAP), a program of Urban Gateways, was launched in April 2018 as the first major Chicago-based initiative facilitating teen access to the rich arts and culture landscape of the city. TAP invites young people ages 13-19 to access day-of-show tickets to performance venues, theaters, and other cultural institutions across the city for just $5. By creating a program that invites all teens to enjoy the arts, Urban Gateways is working to dismantle the assumption that these spaces belong to the elite.

TAP expands arts access and equity for all teens to foster the next generation of Chicago’s diverse artists, audiences, arts administrators, and advocates. Urban Gateways wanted to provide their 8,000+ registered TAP teens with a solution that allows them to engage with a multitude of live performances directly from their mobile devices to increase arts engagement throughout the city.

The main challenge for these apps to be successful was that the UX/UI experience had to be appealing for a mobile-first generation of teenagers from ages 13 to 19 years old. In a space that sees a high turnover on app installs, in order to guarantee this critical requirement, our designers met with teens from the TAP Teen Council for ideation and feedback. Having end-user feedback throughout the development process was extremely important for the ultimate success of the app.

Other technical challenges were:

• TAPs manages all the enrollment through SalesForce so the mobile app needed to be integrated with SF to manage the signup to the app.
• Teenagers could only check-in to a show if they were physically in the show location. In order to guarantee that, we had to include a combination of micro-fences (Beacons) and geolocation solutions in the mobile app.
• The content of the shows was managed in WordPress so the mobile app had to integrate into this cms.