Ticketing System for NYU Wasserman

The client needed a way to manage internal issues and tasks without relying on scattered email threads or informal communication. Staff were raising problems verbally or through ad hoc messages, administrators had no structured way to assign and track work, and nothing was being resolved with consistency.

The requirement was a proper ticketing system: employees raise tickets, administrators review and assign them, both sides can comment, and everyone stays informed automatically through the process.

Cenciss designed and built the full platform from scratch, covering UI/UX, front-end, back-end, and the email notification layer.

Ticket management sounds straightforward until you model the actual workflow. Tickets move through multiple states: raised, under review, assigned, in progress, resolved. Each state change involves different actors and different notification requirements. Getting the data model and workflow logic right from the start was essential to avoid a system that worked in simple cases but broke under real usage.

The email notification system had to be genuinely reliable. Notifications needed to fire automatically at every key event: when a ticket was raised, when it was assigned, and when either party added a comment. Any missed notification would undermine trust in the system and push users back to informal communication channels.

The interface had to work for everyone on the team, not just technically confident staff. Employees with no system administration background needed to raise a ticket and track it without training. Administrators needed a clear dashboard to manage their queue, assign work, and see what was outstanding at a glance.

The platform was built on the MERN stack: React.js for the front end, Node.js and Express.js for the API layer, and MongoDB for data storage. The ticket schema was designed to support the full lifecycle with status tracking, assignment records, and a threaded comment history per ticket.

Role-based access separated the employee and administrator experiences. Employees saw their own tickets, their status, and the comment thread. Administrators saw the full queue with filtering and sorting by status, priority, and assignee, with the ability to take action directly from the list view.

The email notification system was integrated via a dedicated Email API, with triggers configured at each state-change event. Notifications were sent to the relevant parties at each step, with message content that gave enough context to understand what had changed without requiring the recipient to log in just to check.

The interface was designed with simplicity as the priority, minimizing clicks for common actions and making the ticket status visible without needing to open each record.