Santa Maria Novella: 3 years on

Thanks in part to web services like Stripe for payment processing, for a few years now building an online ticket office that is not only custom-built but also owned by the client has become the better solution in many respects.

We already had plenty of experience in engineering, programming, systems administration and usability design, but we had never applied it to the specific field SMN required. Building on this experience, in 2017 we created the Winter Sale ticketing for Il Grande Museo del Duomo and, in 2018, payment processing for the Fondazione Lisio in Florence.

Methodologically, building and maintaining a ticketing web application is no different for us than any other software: defining the budget, constant communication with a stakeholder, working in sprints, thorough testing and checks. As always, attention to detail and transparency are essential, and we're very proud to have maintained, over 3 years, service uptime of over 99%.

Our 2017 numbers compared with the previous year:

• Website visitors: +24%
• Ticket office visitors: +18%
• Tickets sold: +36%
• Total online sales: +86%

The Santa Maria Novella website was one of the first projects where we used DatoCMS (at the time in advanced beta). While the advantages of a static site that still comes with a web app for editing content are increasingly well known today, back then it was a truly innovative solution in Italy.

In three years the site has never had problems or needed special maintenance, so over time we've been able to focus on targeted improvements to usability, such as making the opening-hours tables responsive and improving the events layout. We have also kept the site's components up to date with the features the DatoCMS team has introduced over the years, starting with modular content, which allows great flexibility in managing both the structure and the content of each page.

The online ticket office was built according to our MVP development philosophy: combine the best available web services and build the simplest possible product with all the key features, keeping the initial investment to a minimum.

One important feature that had to be there from day one was dedicated purchase flows for individual users and for visitor groups. This way, travel agencies and tour operators have a dedicated page with specific information and requirements.

We feel we can call what we built for this project a solution that is ethical, because the client owns 100% of its software, as well as all the services it needs to run (Heroku, Stripe and Sendgrid, to name the main ones).

From the start there has been no lock-in in the partnership between Cantiere Creativo and the Opera per Santa Maria Novella, which continues today thanks to the mutual trust built over the years.

As mentioned, we chose Stripe for payment processing thanks to its robust API and a very simple yet powerful dashboard, while for opening-hours management we integrated Google Calendar via its API. Finally, we chose Sendgrid for transactional emails and ticket delivery to customers by email, for the high quality and completeness with which it handles this crucial part of the platform.

Finally, thanks to our collaboration with Softlan, we made it possible for visitors to enter the venue on their own through turnstiles, without stopping at the ticket desk: what they receive by email is the actual ticket.

After launching these MVPs, the next step was analyzing usage statistics and user feedback, which led to targeted improvements to the purchase flow and to the user experience in general.

In 2018 we met a new need of the Opera by adding a section for paid special events. This makes it possible to publish event pages on the public site with a link to buy a ticket for that event directly.

We know that web software has a lifecycle that is relatively short compared with physical consumer goods: cars, home appliances, buildings. At the same time, though, it needs ongoing maintenance to stay functional and fully secure, and to keep up with changes in the regulations in force.

We are currently getting ready for the upcoming European payment rules, SCA Authentication. Keep following our blog for more updates on this change and on our ongoing work with this extraordinary museum complex.