UX Design Case Study— Improving the experience for picking a movie in a cinema

Problem Statement:

Maria and her friends wants watch a movie in a cinema together. The problem is that no one can agree on what to watch. To plan for a movie, they have to look through all the movies, choose between them, then all the cinemas playing them at different times and then decide the number of people going, before they check the availability of seats. This long process is a buzzkill when making ad-hoc plans.

Design a way for Maria and her friends to help them find movies around them, book and get to the movie faster. Feel free to design this at the level of fidelity you prefer.

Design Process

Session lab

Market Research

I did some market research and found some online forums and surveys that focus on the points which users generally consider while choosing between the movies.

1. Users depend heavily on Rotten Tomato and IMDB scores and read film critics to decide if they want to watch a movie or not. If they are not yet convinced, they would like to see a trailer to be sure.
2. Picking a movie also depends on some physiological factors like mood, Favorite actors or series, cinematography, genre, price of the ticket, etc
3. The major influencing factor for people is found to be the friend's suggestions. People often try to choose between them.
4. Users also consider the Audience they are going with eg family, friends, couples, etc.

Target Users

I wanted to design considering all different types of users of different age groups whose needs can be met by the new design, assuming that they are familiar with how to use basic-intermediate features of the phone.

User Research

I created a few open-ended interview questions to get to know my target audience. I was looking to understand their thought process when they plan to watch movies. I wanted to see what were the pain points as well as the helpful parts with the current methods. This also was a chance to verify/disprove thoughts and assumptions I had with the application idea.

Interview questions:

1. How long ahead do you like to plan for a movie?
2. How do you decide what to watch? (What criteria do you use? What catches your eye? What tools do you use?)
3. You want to watch a movie right away. What frustrates you about planning for this?

How I Identify the problems?

I did some cursory research online and by speaking with friends and found a lot of problems. Let me share some of the problems:

1. Users feel overwhelmed by the huge amount of options provided to them, and so many suggestions from everywhere (friends, review websites, etc), that forces them to take a long time to make a decision.
2. Sometimes the user doesn’t have any idea about what to watch and needs someone’s help to decide.
3. It’s hard to find a single app to compare the movie considering all the factors like theater, seats, time of the show, etc.
4. They want to be able to create a poll from some suggestions.
5. They would like to see what are the reviews by their friends or critics or ratings.
6. They would like to connect to different websites for booking the tickets online and see the movie shows, etc.

User journey and Wireframing:

With my goals in place, I got a clearer idea of how to organize information according to the importance of the goals and designed the user journey accordingly.

Visual Design

Problems solved

After Signup, How the user will provide choices that he/she has already planned?

When a person will open an app, how the system will know which types of information should show for the user at this moment.

In the initial screens, a user will go through some questions on the Introduction screen (only for the first time user) and then every time user opens an app, the user will go through the Onboarding screens to provide suggestions and pick a movie.

Movie list and how they can filter and pick a movie

How they can decide whether the movie is worthy to watch?

To solve the problem of having soo many options, the app will show a Recommendation screen with 5 movie suggestions at first based on the inputs by the user. Movie details screen will help the user make a final decision based on the cast, ratings, etc.

Improvements

I believe that in any product there’s always have a lot of scopes to improve the experience. I also found some improvements that can be done for that design.

1. Polling between friends to decide the majority. This will allow users to quickly submit their suggestions, vote, and decide.
2. Also, the app will help the users find movies they will like. Rating movies will build their custom profile and the app will recommend other movies for them based on their taste and what their friends’ likes.
3. Booking experience and viewing the details for the movie show will increase the chances of picking a movie for the users.

Checkout the Figma Design here.

Thanks a lot for reading! Looking forward to the feedback. 😀