From Product Designer Frans Twisk. This was originally posted in the GET Protocol July update blog.

Although we have had a dedicated scanning app since the very beginning of GUTS (and therefor GET), it is finally time to release this publicly! GUTS Tickets has more and more clients who want to use different types of phones for ticket validation and GET Protocol has its second ticketeer, Itix, which is also able to use it for validating their issued tickets through GET Protocol. Bringing the GET Protocol Ticket Scanner, or ‘GET In’ for short, to the app stores will make it easier to distribute, use it standalone and allows for easier updating of the app, which can be used anywhere, a breeze.

Let’s dive a bit into the details of the app. It’s been designed and built to do one task, and one task only (for now): validating tickets and their owners as simple and fast as possible.

You start by loging in to your organisations’ account by entering OR scanning a special access-code. You can immediately start scanning. This simple code makes it easy to distribute access to multiple scanners, while giving them limited access to your event details (e.g. only using the app is allowed, not dashboard access, etc). One phone can even let another phone login, creating a chain reaction useful for big scan teams.

“Always on” or “Press & Hold” — It’s up to you.

Scanning itself can be done by turning the camera into “always on” mode, or press and hold the screen to scan, saving battery life and useful for less crowded lines. Saving battery life is also one of the requirements (duh) and one of the reasons we chose a mostly dark UI, which can save battery life on phones with an OLED screen.

When a QR code is recognised, the app will immediately also get the account linked, and check if it has any valid tickets for the event your organisation is running at that moment. If no valid tickets are found, we show explanatory messages saying what might have caused this (maybe the visitor has tickets for a different date, maybe the QR is a screenshot and therefore timed-out, the QR is simply not valid at all, etcetera). This all happens in well under half a second.

Checking the validity of GET Protocol tickets is as easy as pointing your camera.

With valid tickets the check-in screen appears with all tickets for that account preselected and ready to be checked in with a single tap. This means that a whole group can be checked in at once. It support multiple ticket types, which can all be lowered individually (if someone comes in later), and it shows extra information like for instance the section, entrance and seats that a visitor has assigned.

Check-in happens real-time, using a buffer to write this to a central database, and it’s therefore impossible to check-in the same tickets again, even if this would happen almost instantaneously (e.g. one would always be faster than the other, even if only a few milliseconds) — See Santos’ comments on the viral video above.

After checking in, the app returns to the scanner screen ready to scan the next (batch of) tickets.