Case study · 2025
Atlas: getting a museum's queue down to zero
Six entrances, one ticket desk, a twenty-minute queue on any Saturday. The ticket flow was the bottleneck. We moved it onto visitors' phones — and off the pavement.
- Client
- A city museum, 900k visitors a year
- Role
- Product designer
- Team
- 3 engineers, 1 PM
- Duration
- 4 months
The problem
The museum sold tickets online, but the flow took nine screens and asked for an account. Most visitors gave up and queued instead. Meanwhile the six entrances had scanners that sat unused, because almost nobody arrived with a ticket to scan.
What we did
Three screens, no account. Pick a day, pick a number of people, pay. The ticket lands in the phone's wallet, and the confirmation screen tells you which entrance is quietest right now — that last part is what actually spread the crowd across all six doors.
Outcome
Online share of tickets went from 22% to 71% in the first season. Median queue on a Saturday went from twenty minutes to none. The museum reassigned two ticket-desk roles to the floor.