Client
EXIT
Role
Lead Designer
Year
2025 - 2026
Focus
Product design, PWA, Ticketing, Social features, Maps
Bridge
How do you get festival-goers to switch to a brand-new app?
200+
people using it every day
100%
of the ticket price stays with EXIT
PWA
no app store needed
CONTEXT
EXIT is the biggest party organisation in the Balkans. It sold tickets through partner sites that took a cut of every sale. Bridge moves those sales into EXIT's own app, so the money from every ticket goes to EXIT. Each ticket also comes with an NFT the buyer can resell later.
Bridge is a PWA, so anyone can install it straight from the browser. It brings tickets, festival lineups and a map of where your friends are into one place. The crypto company Avalanche gave EXIT a grant to build it.
CHALLENGE
The hardest part was getting people to use something new instead of the ticket sites they already knew.
EXIT also wanted more than ticketing. They wanted a social network in the app and a Tinder-like feature that connects people going to the same festival. Every extra feature made the app harder to learn, at the moment we most needed people to adopt it.
APPROACH
Questioning every feature
Every client wants everything in their app. As lead designer, my job is to ask whether people will actually use each feature, so I took EXIT through the full list and told them honestly what I thought.
On Bridge this mattered more than usual. Every feature EXIT added, from the social network to the matching feature, was one more thing a new user had to understand before the app felt useful, and the whole project depended on new users sticking around.
Disagreeing and committing
Some of EXIT's choices weren't ones I would have made, such as the app's font. I explained the problems I expected it to cause. They kept it, and I respected their call.
It's their product and their brand, so the final decision was theirs. My job was to make sure they made it knowing the tradeoffs.
Pointing the team to the right tools
The friends map is one of Bridge's core features, next to tickets and lineups. Some of the team hadn't worked with map tools before.
My vegetation management work for Hitachi Energy had taught me which tools to use, so I pointed the team to them for building the friends map. I see helping a client and helping a developer as the same job.
Crypto you never see
Buying on Bridge had to be at least as easy as buying on the partner sites, or nobody would switch. With Avalanche, we built it so fans buy directly from EXIT and all the proceeds stay with EXIT.
A crypto wallet is created when you sign in, so there's nothing to connect. The wallet and the NFT are there so tickets can be resold later, but a fan buying a ticket doesn't need to know about either to use the app.
OUTCOME
Bridge is live and more than 200 people use it every day. Every ticket sold in the app goes to EXIT, with no partner taking a cut.
INDEX
CONTACT
Send me an email