Dr. Phillips Center

In Spring 2020, like other arts venues across the world, Orlando's Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts had to close because of COVID. By November 2020 its show line-ups had been cancelled for nearly six months. 

However, thanks to the Florida sunshine, Dr. Phillips Center was able to find a creative way to bring their community together again for entertainment in its yards and outdoor spaces - and the Frontyard Festival™ was born.

By the time Dr. Phillips Center came to Made, the Frontyard Festival™ was all mapped out. There would be a stage, ticketing booths, and even food and beverage tents in the front yard. For the patrons, there would be a series of physically distanced "pods": 5′ x 7′ structures, built using metal scaffolding materials, with six feet of space between each pod, allowing groups of up to five people to reserve their own space.

Now, all that was needed was the ability to sell tickets to the performances.

There were two main challenges in translating the Frontyard Festival™ into a new seating plan:

• Making sure patrons had a clear understanding of the experience they were going to get, including information about restrooms, bars, and food options.
• Ensuring that patrons could choose their required number of seats in a "pod", without having to buy more tickets than they needed, and that they felt comfortable and secure in their purchase decisions.

The “pods” were a new concept for SeatCurve seat maps. Users would need the ability to select a range of between two and five seats in a pod, so the design of this user journey required a new functionality: a dropdown selection of seats that appeared upon selection of a pod. 

 Thinking carefully about the Tessitura™ setup in the backend, we were able to organize the seating correctly and –most importantly – distance the groups of patrons. Careful attention was given to the user experience so we could be sure that users understood how to proceed with the number of seats that they required for each performance.