Frontyard Festival

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.

Thanks to the Florida sunshine, Dr. Phillips Center found a creative way to bring their community together again - the Frontyard Festival. There would be a stage, ticketing booths, and food and beverage tents in the front yard. For patrons, there would be 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.

All that was needed was the ability to sell tickets.

Two main challenges in translating the Frontyard Festival into a seating plan:

• Making sure patrons had a clear understanding of the experience, including information about restrooms, bars, and food options.
• Ensuring patrons could choose their required number of seats in a “pod” without buying more tickets than needed, and that they felt comfortable in their purchase decisions.

The “pods” were a new concept for SeatCurve seat maps. Users would need the ability to select between two and five seats in a pod, requiring a new functionality: a dropdown selection of seats appearing upon pod selection.

Thinking carefully about the Tessitura setup in the backend, we organised the seating correctly and - most importantly - distanced the groups of patrons. Careful attention was given to the user experience so users understood how to proceed with the number of seats they required for each performance.