The membership that got simpler every release

Thornbury had a membership scheme, a ticketing system, a card printer and a mailing list, and no two of them agreed on who a member was. A member who booked an exhibition slot online was charged, refunded by hand, and posted a receipt.

We spent three weeks watching the front desk before designing anything. Members arrive to do three things: get in, bring a guest, and stop paying or start paying again. Everything else in the scheme — the newsletter, the preview invitations, the shop discount — is something the gallery wants to tell them, not something they came to do.

So the product is those three things, and the rest is correspondence. The first release did less than the system it replaced. The second did less again, after we found that the guest flow was being used to work around a booking rule that should simply have been changed. By the third release the gallery had stopped asking for features and started asking which rule was causing a screen to exist.

The card is still a physical card. We proposed retiring it twice and were overruled twice, correctly: a third of Thornbury’s members joined before the gallery had a website, and the card is the part of the membership they can see.