GatePass

It starts with a video you didn't film. Someone else's night out, someone else's front row, showing up in your feed hours after it happened. That small, familiar moment of watching an event you weren't at is the reason GatePass exists in its current form. Every ticketing product on the market assumes you've already decided to go somewhere. GatePass starts one step earlier, in the scroll, before that decision has even happened.

Overview

GatePass is an event technology platform with two distinct surfaces: B2B organiser infrastructure covering ticketing, access control, session management, check-in and audience analytics, plus a B2C consumer app built around video-first event discovery. This case study documents the design of the consumer mobile app, from first principles through to near-complete, handoff-ready screens.

The problem

Africa's events industry is growing rapidly, but the systems behind these events haven't evolved at the same pace, and the way people discover events remains static and disconnected from how modern audiences consume content.

For organisers: every event starts from zero. A new ticketing system, a new check-in process, a new attendee list. Data is lost once the event ends.

For attendees: discovery is passive and indirect, through word of mouth and reposted stories. The purchase experience is transactional and forgettable.

For the industry: available tools are either imported solutions built for Western markets or rudimentary local alternatives. Nothing is purpose-built for how African events actually operate.

Design philosophy

Context over convention. Every decision was evaluated against its specific context: this user, this moment, this intent, rather than against what ticketing apps typically do.

The system absorbs complexity. Wherever there was a choice between making the user manage something or making the backend manage it, the backend absorbs it.

Emotional register matches the moment. Purchasing feels like anticipation. Checking in feels like arrival. A past ticket becomes a memory.

Process

Information architecture, then user flows, then content inventory and naming, then the design system, and only then screens. User flows were mapped in FigJam before any screen was designed, each structured around trigger, terminal state, complexity rating and edge cases. This sequencing prevented the most common early-stage failure: jumping to screens before the underlying decisions are made, then rebuilding after they are.

The consumer feed

Most people discover events by watching other people's stories about them. They're spectators of an experience someone else is having. The feed turns that spectator position into participation. Full-screen event videos, swipe-up to browse, tap to expand. The gesture vocabulary is borrowed deliberately from TikTok and Reels, since the audience has already internalised it.

The ticket and instalment system

No equivalent to the instalment plan exists in any African event ticketing product today. A buyer can secure a ticket with a partial payment and spread the rest across scheduled payments. The original design used a bullet list to select the amount; it was replaced with a radial arc dial with four snap points, prototyped interactively before being built to validate the concept first.

The scan feature

Context-first, not scan-first. The user declares what they're scanning for before aiming the camera: Connect, Check in, or Redeem. This prevents the most common operational error, processing the wrong kind of scan because context wasn't set.

The staff mode colour shift. Tapping Staff turns the entire interface amber, from the scan reticle to every pill and CTA. In a high-volume queue, an accidental mode switch can't be a subtle UI change.

Key debates

Session selection: checkout or post-purchase? Moved post-purchase. "Will I go?" and "which sessions will I attend?" are different cognitive acts with different optimal timing.

Logout or no logout? Removed. The real edge case, an expired session, is better served by a contextual sheet than a button 95% of users never touch.

Learnings

Pre-design sequencing turned out to be the real work, not overhead in front of it. Copy is design: language precision in a product handling money and event access is a discipline, not an afterthought. And the system should be smart so the user doesn't have to be. The best decisions in this product are the invisible ones.

Reflection

The decisions that matter most here are the ones you can't see: the QR that stays the same for everything, the auth that only shows up when it's needed, the instalment plan that reveals your ticket at the finish line. Those decisions are the design, more than any single screen is.