Wizarding World Passport Details

The Wizarding World Passport is a totally new take on the user profile concept from the fan site Pottermore. Like Pottermore, users can be sorted into their Hogwarts house (using a sorting algorithm developed originally by JK Rowling). The Passport featured all-new graphics and animations. Additionally, new content was added including the Wizarding World Favorites. Favorites allowed fans to pick cards representing their favorite things from the Wizarding World and share them on social media. This Passport engaged fans around the world and generated excitement from Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts superfans who are always hungry for new content related to the Wizarding World.

Our Approach

A Lightning Quick, Well Designed Implementation

Speed was very important for this project, more so than many others. The ongoing development efforts related to the new platform were hugely overdue and behind schedule before Tech Holding started this engagement. The team weighed many different options and chose to go with a quick to develop React SPA front-end coupled with AWS Lambda back end services for generating shareable assets in a scalable way. React is a great choice due to its ubiquity. The pool of developer talent is large, the tooling around it is well supported, and there are communities of React experts around the world constantly supporting and improving React-based tools. The team also used plop to rapidly build new React components that follow best practices by default. Wizarding World Digital and Warner Brothers exclusively use AWS as their cloud services provider. The React application compiled down to static assets and was served from S3 using Amazon’s CloudFront CDN. Customized image processing was also done in the cloud. When it comes to scalability, and enabling the rapid invocation and processing required to generate millions of sharable image assets, a microservice using AWS Lambda was the tool of choice.

Case Outcomes

Fan Response Was Incredible

As soon as the feature launched to the world, fans signed up to share their new Wizarding Favorites on Twitter. The shareable asset shows the fan’s own Hogwarts house, and three of their favorite Wizarding things such as a spell, a character, and a charm or potion.

Client Confidence Soared

With the successful launch of the Passport, Wizarding World Digital showed their appreciation of our efforts. They brought in more Tech Holding staff to take on further challenges they faced related to the Wizarding World platform. This was just one of many successful product launches with Wizarding World Digital and Warner Brothers.

Summary

The right technology, coupled with good decision making went a long way. We used quick, scalable solutions to build and launch a beautiful web application that impacted millions of fans. Choosing tools that serve the client first, Tech Holding builds things the right way and does it quickly.