Times Square Crossroads App

As one of the globe’s most iconic and visited destinations Times Square attracts millions of visitors a year. However it also has a vibrant community of over 230,000 ‘locals’ who have made the area their home or place of work. To serve this vibrant community The Times Square Alliance partnered with I-SITE to create a mobile App for their Crossroads program. The goal of Crossroads is to offer exclusive deals and discounts for local businesses, provide special insight on the area and promote events tailored to residents and workers.

For quick access to content and features the I-SITE team proposed an easy to navigate architecture with three primary content area – Deals, Events and Insider. As an added feature the user can select which area is most of interest to them and customize the App to load that content first. For the Alliance to publish important timely content the I-SITE team proposed an Alerts feature visible each time the user opens the App. It was determined during that up to the minute social and feature content would be published through the upcoming redesign of the Times Square website rather than the App.

Some of the key features of the Crossroads App include:

• Program sign up validated by a Times Square zip code
• Clean, attractive interface with strong visuals and Crossroads program branding
• Deal redemption through a screen shown during purchase at selected restaurant, store, theatre etc
• Deal Favoriting and Save for Later features
• Social sharing
• Tracking and content management through Salesforce
• Deployment on iOS, Android and Windows Mobile

During the planning phase the I-SITE team developed user flows, wireframes and a data management plan for the written and visual content housed in Salesforce. The I-SITE team designed the screen interfaces for the highest degree of standardization across the three platforms. All development was native on the each of the selected platforms.

The Alliance team will be responsible daily for the updating of the content for the App. I-SITE will provide ongoing support and design and development for future releases.