Criterion Ticketing
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
TypeScript, Vue.js, REST APIs
YEAR
2024
EXTERNAL URL
The project where I stepped farthest outside my primary stack. Criterion is a TypeScript and Vue.js ticketing platform built for Roundabout Theatre Company‘s Broadway venue rentals — a deliberate departure from the WordPress and PHP work that defined most of my Situation tenure. Like the Drupal build for ADL and the Rails integration on Villatel, this project demonstrated that the architectural thinking transfers even when the language and framework change entirely. The platform earned a Webby Award Honoree recognition for Best User Experience.
Frontend lead at Situation Interactive, built under Situation’s Hatch innovation program.
Background
Broadway’s largest nonprofit wanted to own its ticketing experience — not outsource it.
Roundabout Theatre Company operates three Broadway venues — the Todd Haimes Theatre, Studio 54, and the Stephen Sondheim Theatre — and regularly rents them to commercial productions. For years, ticketing for those rental shows funneled through external sellers, meaning Roundabout had no control over the purchase experience, no direct relationship with the ticket buyer, and no visibility into the data. With support from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Accelerator for Arts and Culture — a $128 million program launched in 2021 to strengthen digital infrastructure at nonprofit cultural organizations — Roundabout partnered with Situation Interactive to build something that didn’t exist: a proprietary ticketing platform purpose-built for Broadway venue operators.
The project came out of Situation’s Hatch innovation program — nine months of research and development focused on rethinking the user experience of buying a Broadway ticket from the ground up.
Implementation
A typed frontend architecture built to model the complexity of Broadway ticketing.
The platform was built as a TypeScript and Vue.js application — a deliberate departure from the WordPress and PHP stack that dominated the rest of my work at Situation. The ticketing domain demanded it: seat maps, pricing tiers, discount codes, accessibility accommodations, performance schedules, and venue configurations all intersected in ways that required a rigorous type system to keep under control. Every entity in the ticketing flow — shows, performances, seat sections, price levels, discount applications — was modeled as a typed interface, with the API layer enforcing contracts between the frontend and the ticketing backend. The result was a purchase experience that guided users from show discovery through seat selection to checkout with zero ambiguity at each step, handling the edge cases that plague ticketing UX: holds expiring, sections selling out mid-session, dynamic pricing shifts, and discount code validation against specific performance dates.
The type system wasn’t overhead — it was the reason the platform could move fast without breaking. Every API response, every state transition, every user interaction was validated at compile time, not discovered in production.
Results
Webby-honored, processing real Broadway transactions from day one.
Criterion launched in July 2022 with & Juliet as its first production, processing primary ticket sales across Roundabout’s three Broadway venues from day one. The platform gave Roundabout something no external ticketing vendor could: direct ownership of the patron relationship, full visibility into purchase data, and the ability to integrate programs like HipTix — their $30 ticket initiative for theatregoers ages 18-40 — natively into the purchase flow rather than as a bolt-on afterthought. The platform expanded to include native iOS and Android apps, extending the same typed architecture to mobile. In 2024, Criterion was recognized as a Webby Award Honoree in the Best User Experience category — validation from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences that the UX investment paid off.
Criterion remains in active production, processing ticket sales for every rental production across Roundabout’s Broadway houses — a platform built once and scaled to handle the full volume of one of New York’s busiest theatre operations.
