Starzone Music Hub
Consuming news from the music industry in person? Gossip from the world of celebrities is now thrown at you on every corner. But what has been missing until now is a source from which first-hand information is shared. Not from just any journalist, but from the artists themselves.
3 industries, 1 goal, 3 months time
It's nothing new that companies work together across industries. And that's exactly what big companies like Sunrise and Ticketcorner do. Both known throughout Switzerland as "the top of the top", they have joined forces with us at Mindnow to bring something completely new to life.
Sunrise GmbH is the second-largest telecommunications company in Switzerland. Ticketcorner AG is the Swiss market leader in ticketing and offers ticket distribution solutions for events of all kinds.
How do you reconcile a ticketing company and a telecommunications company? With excellent communication and an agile team worthy of a Grammy.
News platform for music enthusiasts
Ticketcorner and Sunrise approached us with the desire to create a platform for music enthusiasts to consume first-hand news, obtain information on events, and order tickets for them. Starzone was supposed to make it possible to gain insights into the music industry that you can't get anywhere else.
The sticking point: a production time of only 3 months.
The time frame was a Herculean task
At the latest after the announcement of the time frame, many other agencies would have probably taken their legs in their hands and run. But for our team, almost no challenge is too big. The key to successful implementation was an agile approach and the flexibility of the entire project team. From the stakeholders to the project managers, to the thinkers and designers, to the developers and quality testers.
From the idea to the plan
starzone should be populated with content in the future and serve as a hub between Sunrise and Ticketcorner. Achieving this sounds all well and good, but it wasn't that easy. From a roughly sketched idea, it was a matter of feeling out, picking up, and formulating the requirements in order to finally create a concrete and sophisticated plan. What was needed was an elaborate and complex concept, for the implementation of which numerous internal as well as external experts were required.
Master-class ping-pong game between design and development
Every step of the software development was implemented within these 3 months. From the development of a concept for the platform, the design of the whole project, and the simultaneous development of it. Project management, stakeholders, and the design and development team played ping-pong with each other.
Once a component was finalized in design, development of it began. The branding and name were not in place for almost two months. During this time, the developers had to program the project based on wireframes. It couldn't have been more agile. This way of working requires extreme stress resistance and flexibility from everyone involved and is unique from a management perspective.
Headless to the stars
The information architecture (IA) of starzone is unique and was designed in the style of social media. This IA had to be programmed with algorithms by the developers so that the end user does not see it, but feels it.
Django on the backend, Next.js on the frontend
The backend, written in Django, needed the implementation of a working and sensible logic, covered by our API as a central place. Thanks to Wagtail as a headless CMS solution, some parts of Wagtail logic could be used and extended. It also made it possible to pull and create data from different sources.
In the frontend, we relied on Next.js. This allows content to be rendered on the server and delivered to the user at lightning speed. The frontend receives the content via our headless content API, which structures block by block and delivers content to the frontend exclusively.
Due to our approach with a headless CMS, starzone remains as flexible as the whole project was. The platform is scalable and sustainable – so nothing stands in the way of a great future.
