wheres.stooshe.com

Stooshe’s headline show at Proud Cabaret gave us a great opportunity to reward fans that use the Where’s Stooshe App.

The app doesn’t have native functionality to restrict access to goodies, so the challenge we had was to make the goody limited to one winner.

The logical user journey was quite complex and had to account for multiple scenarios. I had to make sure the system could answer all of the following questions:

• What do fans see if the tickets have already been found?
  If a user finds the goody but can’t attend the show, how does the prize remain available?
• What happens if fans find the goody at the same time?
• What happens when a fan opens the goody from the stored ‘my goodies’ menu?
• How can we run multiple giveaways on the same system?

I drew up a detailed user journey flow-chart to help me cover all the bases. To include content in the web app we generally include it using an iFrame. So the page I created takes a querystring value to differentiate between different prizes. The first thing the page looks for is a cookie on the user’s device. If it exists, they’ll see a notification screen with their name and their gig details. This covers the stored goodie question.

If the cookie doesn’t exist it checks the database to see if someone else has claimed the prize. If they have then the competition is closed.

If the tickets haven’t been claimed the system checks to see if the goody has been accessed yet. If it has been found but unclaimed the page compares the current time to when the last user found the goody. If the time difference is less than three minutes the user is told to wait for in case it doesn’t get claimed. After three minutes the page refreshes and either let’s them claim the tickets or informs them that someone else claimed them.

So finally if the tickets are still available the user is presented with a form to enter their details. the details are seamlessly submitted via ajax where the database is checked again in case someone took longer than three minutes to claim their tickets and someone else claimed them before the form was submitted. In that unlikely case, the user is given the bad news that they were too slow. If all goes well, their details are added to the database and a cookie is dropped onto their device.

This cookie includes their name and which show they are attending (under 18 or over 18).
This data is then displayed if the user opens the goody from their saved ‘my goodies’ collection.

We launched the competition by giving away a pair of tickets every week before the show. We placed the goodies in specific central London locations and the system worked flawlessly and the eager fans that used the app were dutifully rewarded.