Vivify: Disrupting the market with an agile venue hire booking system

We were approached by the team at Vivify, a new tech startup who wanted to disrupt the venue hire market with a seamless, simple, and smooth booking system - making it an easy process for venues and hirers alike. They were keen to launch quickly, so in the space of a matter of weeks we had a holding page live and a simple registration flow to capture interest.Of course, the opportunity to work on a digital transformation project that would shake up a whole industry meant we were ready and raring to jump on board!

Important aspects to consider…

Versatility is key.

The world has been flipped upside down over the last year and, amongst other learnings, it’s highlighted the importance of extra agile booking systems. It’s even more important that they’re able to keep up with the changing restrictions of the nation, on an ad hoc basis.Fully prepared for spontaneous, last-minute changes, we were able to build a robust system that allowed admins to close facilities and manage bookings where necessary, keeping the end-user informed and happy. We implemented the functional requirements of a frontend brochure website integrating Tailwind UI, some custom components, and Statamic V3.

Every venue is different.

Ok, the above may sound obvious but, what we mean is, each venue can have multiple facilities that are each available in different time slots. This meant that we needed to ensure quick loading speeds so that the availability is updated in ‘real-time’ as much as possible. We found by generating these slots at the facility detail page, rather than the book list/map index, we minimised performance issues - win-win!

The nitty-gritty…

After nailing the booking system, we prioritised the backlog and delivered features in two-week sprints. The primary features included a login area for the Vivify admins, venue admins, and customers. Here they could create bookings on customers’ behalf, see the calendar of bookings, manage bookings and booking slots, create new venues and facilities, manage closures and opening times per facility.