Design Miami holds live events each year (like Art Basel) that connect high-net worth individuals with exhibitors who showcase one-of-a-kind art pieces that sell from $5,000 to $250,000+. Their most recent flagship event at Miami Beach hosted more than 40 exhibitors and received over 31,000 visitors. Each fair attracts prominent art critics, curators, and celebrities such as Serena Williams, Rihanna, and Pharrell.

Business challenge

Already one of the biggest art exhibitors in the US, Design Miami wanted to continue growing their brand and engage a larger audience. The team focused on developing a new mobile app that could improve and extend every phase of their events.
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The goal was to have the app live in time for Design Miami’s marquee fair, which was only 3 months away. Their technical team — led by Brian Johnson — tried to build the mobile app but ran into three primary issues:

1. Time constraint: Johnson knew this project would typically take at least 6 months to complete but he only had 3 months.
2. Lack of clear scope: They had several ideas about what they wanted their new mobile app to do but struggled to organize their wish list and refine it into a clear set of features, laid out on a practical, achievable roadmap.
3. Huge data integration problem: Design Miami’s new mobile app had to stay in-sync with their website. Both the app and the website had to show the same exhibitor data and the same items for sale —even as this data changed constantly before, during, and after the event. To add to the challenge, the app had to stay in-sync during a live event with poor connectivity.
   
   Unfortunately, Design Miami’s system of record made this difficult. It was a WordPress database that used MySQL in an archaic, non-relational manner. To bring the website’s data to the mobile app, it would first need to be transformed into a format the app could work with— and they had to do so every time they synced the two assets.

With the clock ticking, Johnson knew he needed outside help. Johnson needed a technology partner that not only had experience building mobile apps, but more importantly were data experts.

We set a high-profile release for our app aligned with our next big live event, and we had no option to release it late. But we didn’t have the in-house expertise to ship our new app by the deadline with enough functionality to market it effectively. To hit our deadlines, we knew we needed to seek outside help.

- Brian Johnson, Director of Platform Engineering at Design Miami

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‍Ultimately, Johnson chose to partner with The Zig because:

• Could Solve the Scoping Problem. “They were big picture thinkers who could see this project from the business’ perspective, and translate all of our dreams about the app into functionality we could realistically build.”
• Could Deliver on Time. “They didn’t just say ‘yes’ to everything we wanted to do. They were just as interested as we were in making this a success for our business, and helped us trim and prioritize our wishlist to something achievable.”
• Had the Right Skills and Experience. “They had built great mobile apps before, and they had developers and designers in-house who could build the functionality we needed, in the timeline we had to hit. Critically, they had engineers who could solve our data integration challenge. We had two in-house backend engineers with no capacity to take on this work, and we knew our external partner would need to pick it up for us.”

Solution

The Zig’s engineering team knew to drive to a successful launch, they needed to solve the two biggest problems — a lack of scope, and a tricky data integration.

To start, they brought clarity to the project’s lack of scope. Design Miami didn’t have a fully-fledged idea on kick-off day, but The Zig couldn’t let that slow down development. So, The Zig immediately began development of the app’s “must have” features, while the rest of the app’s designs were worked on.
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The Zig was willing to be flexible as requirements constantly changed. They dug deep into our goals for the app and how we wanted our end users to interact with it and helped us define a scope that made sense.

- Brian Johnson, Director of Platform Engineering at Design Miami

The Zig’s architect and engineers used a three-phase approach to deliver the final solution:

• Phase 1: Visioning (1-2 weeks)
  The Zig held scoping calls with Johnson and his design team. They agreed on a realistic set of features that they could achieve during the project’s timeline. They also set up weekly check-ins to align on deliverables.
• Phase 2: Development (~2-3 months)
  ‍The Zig assigned one mobile developer and one data engineer to the project. The mobile developer worked on the app as the designs came in. The data engineer focused on the data integration problem. During the last few weeks, The Zig’s CEO worked hands-on to ensure they launched on time.
• Phase 3: Post-development and Live Support (~2-3 weeks)
  At the end ofdevelopment, The Zig triaged the app’s remaining bugs and performance issues. During the event, they ensured the app stayed online, and updated its data in near-real-time as new listings came in at the last minute.

Solving the data integration problem

The app’s data had to come from Design Miami’s system of record, a WordPress database. Sourcing data from WordPress presented two challenges:

• CMS users do not directly manipulate data via WordPress’ MySQL DB because of the complexity of the data architecture.
• It has a non-traditional proprietary DB architecture that is not optimized to serve mobile apps.
• It is heavily dependent on stored procedures to update records in a non-deterministic way especially when coupled with behavior from third-party plugins.

To solve this, The Zig:

• Quickly assimilated a proprietary and archaic data architecture to enable the migration to occur smoothly.
• Created a custom migration tool to move data from the website to the app.
•  Built ad hoc systems to normalize and backfill the data during the ETL process.
• Synced website and app data every few minutes without performance loss.
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“Our system of record is a WordPress database that uses MySQL, but not in a relational way. The queries to extract that data get pretty complex and don’t perform very well. This was going to be a pretty big pain point for the mobile app. If The Zig hadn’t been involved, I’m not sure we could have gotten the data into the app in the format we needed.”

- Brian Johnson, Director of Platform Engineering at Design Miami

Results

As a result of working with The Zig, Design Miami was able to solve its technical challenges and launch their new mobile app in time for Design Miami’s upcoming live event.

Design Miami was able to launch their app in just under 3 months with a robust feature set that included:

• A show guide for the current event, as well as past and upcoming events.
• Expanded information for every exhibitor and the items they showcased.
• QR code scanning to instantly pull up expanded information on items.
•  A notification-driven “inside look” to present deals to consider and activities to attend during the event.
• Access to the website to view objects and make 1-click purchases online.
• Post-event experiences including 3D tours and new editorial content.

The app was a success, generating thousands of downloads from a select group of high-net worth individuals at the event.

Design Miami continues to operate their app, and it remains a cornerstone of their strategy to meet new opportunities as part of the art industry’s ongoing digital transformation.

The Zig was easy to work with, adaptable to our project as it changed, and dynamic enough to solve each new challenge that came up. Our app received a few thousand installs — which is really significant for our audience — and included significant innovations for our market, like making high-end art pieces available for purchase online with transparent pricing. But without The Zig, we may not have completed the project on time at all.”

- Brian Johnson, Director of Platform Engineering at Design Miami