Designing a ticket management app that became something bigger.

How a ticket management brief became a full native mobile app for discovering and attending live events across East Africa, from passwordless sign-up to QR venue entry.

Sole designer. End to end.

I was the only designer on this product. That meant owning everything from initial research through to the final component spec that engineers built from. Specifically:

The PM defined priorities and managed stakeholder alignment. The three mobile engineers (iOS, Android, backend) built from my specs. I worked directly with them on implementation questions, particularly around state management and animation timing.

It started with ticket management. The opportunity turned out to be bigger.

The original ask was straightforward: build a mobile app where attendees could manage their tickets. Store them, scan QR at the venue, share them with friends. We already had a web marketplace, but no native attendee app at all.

When I looked at that brief, I saw the gap: building an entire app just for ticket management felt incomplete. We had no buyer-side mobile experience. Meanwhile, if you're someone who just landed in Nairobi and you're trying to figure out what's happening this weekend, there's no single place to go. Plenty of platforms manage ticketing, but very few handle event discovery well.

So I expanded the scope: not just ticket management, but a full attendee experience. Discovery, purchase, and ticket lifecycle, all in one native app. The merchant tools (event creation, dashboard) already existed as separate products. This app would be where those events meet the people who attend them.

I presented the expanded scope to the PM and engineering lead with a competitive analysis and rough wireframes. After reviewing the opportunity, the team aligned on pursuing the full attendee app rather than the narrower ticket-only version.

What research told me before I designed anything.

Before opening Figma, I spent time understanding how people actually find, buy, and attend events in East Africa. Three inputs shaped the product:

Urban, mobile-first, plans socially.

Six principles shaped every screen.

The paths I considered and the ones I rejected.

Before settling on the current product shape, I explored several approaches. Some were dead ends. Others clarified what mattered.

❌ Map-first discovery I wireframed a version where the home screen was a map showing events near you. It looked compelling but failed for two reasons: most users in Nairobi don't think about events spatially (they think about what kind and when), and map rendering on lower-end Android devices was slow enough to feel broken.

❌ Social feed model I explored a feed-based discovery (friends are attending, you might like) similar to Dice. But we didn't have the social graph data to power it, and building that would have delayed the product by months. I chose category-and-time browsing because it works without a network effect.

✓ Single-page checkout vs. multi-step I prototyped both. The single-page version looked cleaner but felt overwhelming on mobile, especially with ticket tiers, contact details, and payment methods visible at once. The three-step approach with a progress indicator reduced cognitive load at the highest-anxiety moment: handing over money.

✓ Bottom tab bar vs. hamburger menu Not a close call: Explore, Tickets, and Account needed to be one tap away at all times. A hamburger would have hidden the core product behind a drawer. Bottom tabs also gave me a place to surface "My Tickets" as a persistent badge count.

Six journeys, one product.

The app spans the full lifecycle of attending an event. Each flow was designed as a complete journey, not isolated pages.

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The UX decisions that shaped the product.

Nightlife energy, checkout calm.

The brand wants to feel like nightlife; checkout needs to feel calm and safe. I resolved this by concentrating brand energy in moments (splash, confirmation, the ticket motif) while keeping transactional screens quiet and legible.

The tradeoffs behind the decisions.

What the design work produced.

The app is live, with 6,000+ downloads. Alongside the launch, here's what the design work produced:

Now that the app is live (6,000+ downloads), I'll keep expanding this section as post-launch usage data comes in.

What designing this product taught me.