Conference Check-in & Badge Printing.
Every visitor to a student recruitment fair gets a printed badge at the door. Staff scan the barcode from the visitor's registration email, a thermal printer produces the badge, and the business knows who came and when.
Built for the queue at the door
A student recruitment fair works like a trade show for education: universities from abroad take a stand at a venue, and local students come to meet them. Before this system, nobody was checked in at the door, so there was no record of who came or when, and nothing on a visitor that a university could scan. Now staff check every visitor in and hand them a printed badge on a lanyard.
Scan or search
Staff scan the barcode from the visitor's registration confirmation email, or look the visitor up by email address.
A badge on the spot
The visitor's badge, carrying their QR code and barcode, prints straight away on a thermal label printer, ready for the lanyard.
Walk-ins
Anyone who never registered signs up at the door in a quick form, linked to the barcode already scanned, and gets a badge like everyone else.
Unfinished registrations
A visitor who started registering online but never finished can complete it at the door.
Reprints
Staff can print a visitor's badge again at the door.
Built for local staff
One fair runs in several cities, so staff first pick the fair and city they are working. The screens come in four languages, because the staff at the door are local and may not speak English.
From scan to printed badge
The barcode starts in the confirmation email a student receives when they register on the fair's website. At the door, the operator app sends the scan to the central fairs API, which holds every registration, and gets back the visitor's record and a badge image to print. The door station stores nothing itself.
Where the barcode comes from: Self-Serve Fair Sites.
What the badge made possible
The badge is where everything else on the fair floor starts. Checking visitors in gave the business data it had never had, and gave the universities something to scan.
Leads on the fair floor
University staff scan a student's badge at their stand and get the student's details as a lead, instead of writing them down on paper.
Attendance as it happens
For the first time, the business knew who came to each fair and when, and could see how visitors flowed through the day.
Marketing that reacts
Attendance data changed how marketing was run, especially on two-day fairs, where check-ins show whether the second day needs more marketing behind it.
Where the badge is scanned: Conference Lead Capture App.
What I coded
The system was built by three core contributors. I co-coded the back end, working in tight parallel with a front-end colleague.
- Co-coded the back end of the check-in and badge-printing system, as one of three core contributors.
- Built the barcode and email lookup, walk-in registration and unfinished-registration handling that still run at the door today.
- Implemented the flow for visitors who are not yet registered, across five iterations against an API that was being built at the same time.
- Implemented the print pipeline that turns a badge image into a label on a thermal printer.
- Its later move onto the central API was part of the company-wide migration I decided and drove.
Tech stack
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