Project Profile: "First Night Boston"

First Night Boston is America's oldest and largest New Year's Eve celebration of the arts. Depressed Press has headed the development effort of the First Night web site since 1996 (First Night '97).

Visit First Night Boston.

Challenge One: How Many Hits did you Say?

The overshadowing concern with the First Night web site is the tremendous traffic created in such a short period of time. Well over 90% of the site's traffic occurs on December 30th and 31st. This traffic has been growing year by year so that now we expect upwards of a million page views in two days. Of course the other side of this is that for the rest of the year the site sees nearly no traffic at all.

First, we helped First Night find a host that could handle this kind of traffic. We had to work with the host provider to understand the unique needs of this web site, namely that the traffic, unlike most sites, is wildly variable but utterly predictable.

Secondly we optimized our applications as much as possible, although the initial design called for some very complex interactions.

Then, working with First Night, we identified those interactions that were most likely to cause problem and came up with compromises to either remove or simplify them.

Challenge Two: So Little Time, so Much to Do!

First Night Boston is a huge festival which hosts, for a single evening, well over 200 artists at over 45 venues in and around Boston. We needed a powerful, easy-to-use way to allow the web site patrons to sift through that information and find the events that they wanted easily. We also had to make it programatically simple enough survive the expected traffic.

We created an "Interactive Planner" application that allowed patrons to retrieve a narrowed listing of events by selecting from several categories (Dance, Poetry, etc). In addition limits could be applied as well; such as displaying only those events with hands-on activities or sign-language interpretation. The patron could then select events and times to add to their "plan", which was maintained across visits and allowed the patron to edit their plan throughout the month.

We used Cookie technology to maintain the plan on the patron's machine thus reducing server overhead. For 1998 (First Night '99) we extended this functionality to the map of events allowing patrons to select a venue and see only those events associated with it; events which could then be added to the patron's plan. Once the patron was happy with their plan they could print it or email it to themselves or a friend.

Challenge Three: The Customer Needs Control.

When creating the Interactive Planner we quickly realized that a system was needed that allowed the First Night office edit control over the event list. Of course the First Night office staff had no web design or database experience (which is why we were hired in the first place).

Working with the First Night office staff we examined their normal methods of working with event information and designed a back-end system that, as much as possible, mirrored them. Although still somewhat primitive the system allows for complete control over events, venues, and categorization. A nice benefit of the system was the ability to maintain multiple databases of events. This aspect allowed us to easily keep the previous years site active while designed the new site. Another benefit is the ability to maintain a development database that allows the staff to test changes in a safe environment before applying them to the production site.

The Future

One of our major goals has been to create generic, reusable systems that can be used every year regardless of that year's graphic design. The creation of the client editable events system has allowed us to focus on more esoteric user interface and presentation issues. We are also designing several systems that we would not have had time for otherwise such as a GPS-based distance calculator and proximity searches.

All told our experiences and relationships with First Night Boston have been wonderful and we plan to continue working with them for a long time to come.