About

Context

Maestro is the audience platform for cultural institutions: ticketing, membership, giving, communication and attendance in one patron record. Tessitura is the CRM underneath, not the product. It is multi-tenant. The test case here is the Cincinnati Symphony.

The direction is Beyond the Seat. The seat is the brand’s foundational unit: one patron alone, an audience when repeated. So a member’s several relationships sit on one screen instead of behind separate tabs.

This is the member side. The app a subscriber opens between buying a ticket and walking into the hall. It serves four of the five domains; giving has no surface in it at all, which is the largest gap between what Maestro says it is and what this shows.

Two programs run alongside each other and the app has to hold both. A season subscription, and Harmony Pass, a monthly membership giving free tickets to selected shows. They renew on different clocks and mean different things, so they sit as separate cards rather than tiers of one thing.

Five questions, in the order a member asks them.

1. What am I attending next?
2. What do I need before I leave the house?
3. How do I get in?
4. What is included in each of my memberships?
5. What must I reserve, renew or use soon?

Home answers the first two, the access sheet the third, the membership rail the fourth. The fifth is why renewal and unclaimed Harmony Pass shows surface before anyone goes looking.

Audience

The subscriber

A subscriber, not a buyer. Same seats every season, six or more performances a year, converted years ago by the orchestra rather than by an app. That removes the acquisition half of a ticketing app.

It does not remove buying. A subscriber still picks up single tickets outside their package, claims Harmony Pass shows and takes a waitlist place, which is why Events carries prices and an All events mode.

How they read it

Older than the median app user, often attending with a spouse, reading in a low-lit lobby minutes before a downbeat. That sets the type size and the contrast floor. Nothing goes below 11px, and seat and section stay large enough to read aloud when a scanner fails.

Who the brief also names

Donors, students, first-time attendees and non-subscribers, each with its own job in the brief. This prototype serves none of them. They sit on the navigation map as roadmap, labeled.

Output

Ten screens. Four destinations: Home, Events, Tickets and Profile. A navigation map of the whole surface, where thirty four of fifty three places are built and the rest are drawn and marked as not built.

The brief proposed five tabs, with Membership as its own destination. It is a rail on Home instead. A patron holds more than one relationship with the orchestra; a tab would have shown one and hidden the rest.

Alongside the app, an identity system and a design system: type, color, motion, components and voice, over the token layer they all read from.

Two things are unfinished. The typefaces are trial and desktop licenses, which have to be cleared before this goes anywhere public. The member pass shows no scannable code, because there is no credential system to draw one from.