Everything that’s happening tonight — in your own back yard or across town.
“I’d like to go out Saturday, spend $23, and I’d like to only see bluegrass.” — thought no one, ever. Yet the vast majority of event databases forced us to navigate their show listings this way. Enter Trill Tonight.
Research
There’s nothing wrong with bluegrass, or even Saturday, but we were convinced there had to be a better way to explore the deep wealth of live shows Boston had to offer. We spent a couple of weeks conducting interviews — as well as a few memorable nights standing outside the doors of venues as their shows ended for the night — to get inside the thought process of true fans.
What we learned is that in Boston concertgoers often pick a neighborhood more than a specific act or venue. They’ll look in their own personal neighborhood and then decide to venture out to the next T stop and then the next. Other factors always went into the mix, including who they were meeting, the weather, and what bars or clubs were within walking distance.
Low fidelity
The first key idea was to start the app within your actual neighborhood as opposed to a zip code or other data-driven classification. We built our own geojson map layer and defined the neighborhoods of Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville based on t stops, university hangouts, and other local details.
The second key idea was to only show events happening that night. Users wanting to search or filter for dates farther out were redirected to our web experience.
Development
The production of this app involved working with both on site and remote contract developers. Documentation needed to be slightly more formal than if we were all sitting in the same room together iterating.
High fidelity
Launch Event
Trill Challenge Promo
Trill experimented with a variety of show curation and promoting formats. The #trillchallenge campaign encouraged fans to compete for who could see the most shows in a given 24 hour period.