It had been 3 long years since the last Glastonbury. The global pandemic had inflicted 2 lockdowns and social distancing measures on the UK. As the biggest, most iconic music festival in Europe, Glastonbury’s return was a BIG deal. The UK really needed to party. Tickets sold out in 20 minutes.

Our brief was to create an app that hundreds of thousand of people could count on - to help them experience their best Glastonbury yet.

Despite the huge crowds you see at the pyramid stage, the fact that Glastonbury takes place across 1,100 acres of land over 5 days means that every person’s Glastonbury experience is different.

Our idea was to build a festival-proof app that did more than just show you what was happening at Glastonbury 2022 - and instead become an integral part of each and every festival-goers experience, no matter how they wanted to ‘do’ the festival.

We developed the app to enable you to personalize your planning – from the artists you wanted to see, to where you had pitched your tent, to remembering where your favourite food stall was. So from the moment you arrived you could navigate your Glastonbury – no one else’s.

Our strategy was to build the app to be a festival essential that you could rely on to enhance your experience. We built our strategy on 3 pillars:

PUT THE EXPERIENCE FIRST: The Glastonbury experience is made of many moments that overlap across 5 days. It’s big and its complicated - so we needed to help users plan and navigate their own way through it.

BUILD IT FESTIVAL PROOF: Anyone who has tried camping knows the quality of your kit has an impact on your enjoyment of the experience. So we needed to ensure the app could handle the strain of up to 220k+ festival-goers.

LISTEN TO THE FANS: The festival has been running for over 50 years and many fans have been ‘doing’ Glastonbury for a while. For the app to really be a success we would need to tap into the knowledge and experience of Glastonbury’s core users.

We built the 2022 Glastonbury App from the ground up to put users’ festival experience centre stage.

Personalised line up: Users could plan their experience by creating their own line up of favourite artists.

Interactive map with custom pins:  A fully searchable and interactive map allowed you to drop custom pins to help find important things like your tent or favourite food van. 

Battery optimised Dark Mode: By optimising to users’ power-saving settings we ensured the apps features used as little power as possible.

Fan feedback features: We launched the app 3 weeks early to be able to respond to user feedback on twitter and built in the most popular features suggested – like an A-Z search, a compass and radar.

Real-time data dashboard: We built a dash using live data that the organisers could see in real-time to help monitor and manage the festival on the ground. 

The EE Glastonbury App quickly became a festival essential, being downloaded and used by over 75% of those at the festival.

Festival-goers embraced the apps features, adding 5.3 million artists to line-ups, an average of 36 artists added to every personalised line-up.

The user experience lived up to the hype - we went from the previous crash rate of 8% at the 2018 festival to 0.01% in 2022.

Most importantly users loved it - the app store rating went from 1.2 stars for the previous version to 4.8 stars, (based on a whopping 2.4k reviews).

The app became an integral part of the festival experience for thousands of festival-goers. And by building it to support data analytics for the very first time it became an invaluable tool for the festival organisers too - helping them make informed decisions on the ground and plan an even better Glastonbury Festival next year.