Quick Sale: selling a ticket in three taps.

A point of sale usually sits on a counter. TicketingHub's runs on the phones of people who sell tickets standing up: at a kiosk, at a bus stop, on the pavement next to the tour bus. They work for the tour operators and attractions that sell through TicketingHub, which calls them suppliers.

I designed the whole app from scratch to replace , the old one. This study looks at one small part of it, Quick Sale, a way to sell a ticket in three taps.

Home

The app opens on Home. It has two ways to sell: Quick Sale, a screen of the supplier's favourite tickets, and New Booking, the full flow for everything else.

Point Of Sale

New Booking
Click on Quick Sale and add a few tickets.

Quick Sale shows up as soon as a supplier sets up its first favourite in the dashboard. Without favourites, the app skips Home and opens New Booking.

Quick Sale is a tunnel. Once in, the seller goes from the ticket to the payment. Outpost had one way in: , for the product chosen in Settings.

Three taps

One adult ticket takes three taps in Quick Sale. Outpost took eight.

Six of Outpost's taps made the order, and two more closed the summary after it. Most orders hold two tickets, and two tickets take four taps in Quick Sale.

A sightseeing supplier asked for a way to sell fast. Their staff should finish a sale in as few clicks as possible, for cash, card or voucher.

I first thought of a place for the tickets they sell most, which they could add as favourites. But even with favourites, a sale still meant choosing a product, then tickets, then a time, then adding to the basket, then paying. Quick Sale had to be the fastest checkout we could give them, so I merged the favourites and the checkout into one flow.

Favourites

The supplier chooses which favourites appear, from the dashboard. One screen can hold tickets from several products.

Quick Sale

, chosen in Settings. To sell more than one, the seller turned on Always Ask for Product. Then every sale began with a list of all the supplier's products, A to Z.

The Pareto principle says most results come from a few causes. Suppliers set up about four favourites each. Almost all of them sell with favourites, and most of their orders went through Quick Sale.

Tap targets

Each favourite is one product and one ticket type. A tap adds a ticket, and the count shows large in the favourite's lower corner. Holding a favourite for two seconds turns it red and shows a cross that clears it.

, at the far end of its row. A favourite on an iPhone 18 Pro is seven times as big. Fitts's law says a bigger, closer target is faster to hit.

The supplier asked for a simpler way to pick tickets than plus and minus buttons. Their sellers had used other point of sale apps and recorded two of them for us. That is Jakob's law: people expect a new app to work like the ones they already know.

The bar

A bar at the bottom shows the number of tickets and the total, next to Checkout. Checkout stays disabled until the first ticket is in.

Quick Sale

Add a few tickets to see the total. Long press a ticket to remove it.

, but no total. The total came on the cart, after Add Booking, so a seller added it up in their head. That is working memory spent on arithmetic.

Basket

Tapping the cart in the bar opens the basket in a drawer over the favourites: a summary of the order, one list per product. A swipe takes a product out, and closing the drawer goes back to the favourites. It's only there for a seller who wants to check the order before Checkout.

Quick Sale

Tap the cart, then swipe a product left to remove it.

The basket used to be a page of its own, so adding a booking left the seller several screens deep. Now Quick Sale stays on Quick Sale, with the basket open over it. In Outpost, the cart was a screen of its own too, reached through Add Booking.

Timeslots

I took the time out of the main path. If a ticket has one timeslot that day, the app picks it. If it has several, the day's times open in a drawer over the favourites. If it has none, the app says so.

Quick Sale

Thu, 5 Mar 2026

Coast Day Trip

Adult

Pick a time, then tap a favourite.

whenever no time was set. Auto-select Time skipped it, but picked the last departure that had already started.

Tesler's law says some complexity can't be removed, only moved. Quick Sale moves it into the app. At the supplier that asked for it, sellers almost never pick a time. All but one of their bookings had only one time that day. Across all suppliers on the POS, about half of bookings had one time that day, and the rest had several.

Checkout

On the checkout the total comes first, the customer's details are optional, and the payment buttons sit at the bottom.

Checkout

Total$55.00

Optional

Customer Details

, and Cash Payment opened a screen of its own. Quick Sale's checkout has five. Hick's law says every extra choice adds to the time it takes to decide.

Across the suppliers who sell with favourites, 78% of orders are paid by card through Stripe, 17% in cash and 5% on an outside terminal.

The whole sale

Here is all of it together, from the favourites to the payment.

Where it stands

The new POS shipped in January 2026, on iOS and Android, and Quick Sale followed in March. By September 2026, 31 suppliers had set up Quick Sale.

The supplier that asked for it sells on nine Android devices. They take cards on the devices themselves, with Stripe's Tap to Pay. Since March they have taken 2,196 orders.

The tickets sold here are the same ones customers buy online through the booking widget.