How Kaufleuten scans event tickets with a web app

Kaufleuten is Zurich's premier cultural and nightlife institution. Its world-class program attracts thousands of guests every day.

Event ticketing at Kaufleuten

Kaufleuten uses a custom ticketing solution developed by the award-winning Swiss digital agency required. Event tickets are scanned at the entrance using a web app running on a smartphone.

The ticketing staff at the door are often students working at Kaufleuten’s events, and all scanning is done on their own smartphones (bring your own device, BYOD). The scanner app has to work on whatever phone a staff member brings, from the latest iPhone to an older Android device.

Why required replaced ZXing-JS

The first version of the ticket scanner was built on ZXing-JS, an open-source barcode scanning library. In practice, two problems kept coming up at the door.

The first was camera selection. Modern smartphones have several rear cameras, such as wide-angle, ultra-wide and telephoto, and the wrong choice results in blurry, unfocused images that can't be scanned. With ZXing-JS, picking the right camera was left to the app, and getting it right across the wide range of devices used by the ticketing staff proved difficult.

The second was general reliability. At a venue entrance, guests queue up and every scan counts: a ticket that takes several attempts to scan slows down the line. And since many of Kaufleuten’s events take place in the evening, tickets are often scanned in dim lighting, which makes low-light performance essential. Scanning with ZXing-JS was not dependable enough for this, so required looked for an alternative. See how STRICH compares to ZXing-JS.

A ticket scanner web app powered by STRICH

Required integrated the STRICH Barcode Scanning SDK into the existing ticket scanner web app. STRICH takes care of selecting a suitable camera on each device, and its robust decoding scans tickets reliably, even in the low light of an evening event, so the ticketing staff can focus on the guests.

With a different personal device in every hand, broad device compatibility is essential. Kaufleuten has no control over which phones are used at the door, so the scanning SDK has to work on all of them. STRICH is tested extensively across a wide range of iOS and Android devices and browsers, which gives required the confidence that the scanner works for every staff member, on every phone.

Required has an extensive write-up where they describe their solution in detail.

Why a web app instead of a native app

Using a web-based solution to scan event tickets has several advantages for Kaufleuten:

• No app needs to be installed on the smartphones, which are the personal devices of the ticketing staff (BYOD).
• Updates to the app are easy and instant, as there is no costly and lengthy App Store distribution process involved.
• Web apps are more accessible and cost-efficient to develop than native apps. Instead of relying on specialized, expensive native iOS and Android developers, existing web development resources can be leveraged.
• A single code base simplifies maintenance and future development.