Chicago Ideas Week now boasts a customized online ticketing platform and mobile app – all thanks to our new technology partner, Table XI.

During the past couple of months, Jen Mozen, Table XI’s delivery principal, has led a team of about six developers and designers to revamp the CIW user experience across multiple platforms.

Mozen translated the tech specs for us to share how much easier ticket buying will be – for both our greater CIW attendee family and our internal team. So mark your calendars, because tickets go on sale to members Aug. 15 and to the public Sept. 3.

We want to make this browsing and buying experience as friendly as possible.

Last year, CIW used an external ticketing system. Our challenge this year was to integrate and improve that experience from a user perspective so that it’s very easy for people to see the full schedule of what’s out there, the speakers that are coming and find topics that interest them.

The mobile app is a box office-type app that CIW volunteers and staff will use to validate tickets at the events. After that, it will let CIW do a lot of analysis on attendees’ interests and better tailor planning and scheduling for next year. It will also help – on the event side – to move people faster at through door.

We spent the initial two days with the CIW team to get an understanding of the big picture. We boiled all of those requirements into very small pieces and built in one-week increments.

We looked at the backlog of features that needed to be built, picked the highest priority items in the queue and actually demonstrated them to the CIW team once a week. The CIW team is always getting to see progress on what’s being built and provide feedback.

The biggest challenge is the short time frame. We started this project in May, and given that sponsor tickets go on sale Aug. 1, we had about two and half months to complete and build a custom ticketing system from scratch.

And we needed to make sure that we delivered quality. We need to know that these tickets work and offer a good user experience, so that people can enjoy Chicago Ideas Week.

It was obviously a big deal when the new site went live Thursday. It was very exciting to see the updated design and the schedule go up, and see the things that we’ve been working on for the last few months finally be visible to all of Chicago.

And Jessica (Malkin), CIW’s executive director, brought us pies one week. That was really rewarding. They were Bang Bang pies. The life expectancy of a pie in our office is about 24 minutes. We made sure we got them before we announced it to the rest of the office. It’s nice to share with a team that helps share successes as much as they have.

Part of what’s exciting for the team is the tight schedule. It’s really exciting to work on something and know that it’s going to be used very quickly. So while that tight deadline can be intimidating, it’s also very exciting for the developers because they know that what they are building is really important.

They also really want to understand the business process they are trying to improve and the users who will be using the system – so much so that we took a field trip with the CIW team to the Cadillac Palace Theater last week to test the ticketing app. We printed out specs of sample tickets and six of us went over there to simulate scanning tickets to make sure the app worked.

Working with the CIW team has been awesome. The things that we focus on are very technical, and it’s really fun to get to work with that team because they spend their days talking to thought leaders and planning these interesting events. It’s different from what we do every day, and it’s really great to be able to mix the two.

We are continuing to make little tweaks here and there, to do everything we can to improve the user experience. And then we are also looking ahead to 2014. Everyone who is participating this year can expect even more next year.

We will be hosting our own Lab as well to give participants a hands-on experience on managing the complex relationship between clients, project managers and software developers. We’ve always looked to Chicago Ideas Week as something we believe and support, and we are thrilled to be involved on so many levels.

*Editor’s note: This interview has been edited down from its original form.

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Written by: Jia You
Photography provided by: Table XI