Movie Scape is local suburban movie theater that strives to make each film they show as captivating and comfortable as possible for their viewers. The theater is targeting young families that want to go watch films together after work and school.

Buying a ticket in-person can take a long time and you don’t know which seats you’re getting. The goals is to design an app for the movie theater that allows customers to purchase tickets online and have a seat ready for them when they arrive.

My Role

UX designer leading the app and responsive website design from conception to delivery.

My Responsibilities

CConducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, iterating on designs, determining information architecture, and responsive design.

Completed

May 2022 to September 2022

User Personas

I conducted interviews with a variety of local residents that have frequented the theater at least once in the prior month. A primary user group identified through research were families that wanted to go see a movie in-person, but wanted to guarantee they could have seats next to each other before going to the theater.

While this was one factor in deciding whether to buy a movie ticket, research also found that movie-goers also care about price of ticket, previous reviews of the film, and speed of getting to the theater.

Pros

• “I only like seeing movies that have good reviews.”
• “I only go [to the movies] if my friends are coming with.”
• “I want to be the first of my friends to see the new Marvel movie!”
• “I could spend my whole day at the theater.”

Cons

• “I don’t know who else I can share my Geekdom with?”
• “It can get expensive, but I have the year membership so it’s not too bad.”
• “I’d rather stream a movie on Netflix than pay to go see one.”
• “The seats can be gross and uncomfortable.”

User Journey Map

Making this user journey map gave me the insight for several features I wanted to included in my design like a monthly challenge, AI Insect identifier, and a geolocation pollinator tracker to make finding pollinator species easier.

Wireframing

The paper wireframes initially created showed a user’s journey from the home page of our movie theater app to confirmation of a purchased ticket. I made sure to include Video Movie Trailers and Reviews so users could learn more about the film before deciding to buy.

Usability Study

Using the Lo-Fi Prototype, a few user frustrations emerged such as there were not enough ways to pay, people noted theaters might have different ticket prices, and some users had no interest in "remaining ticket feature" that showed the number of seats available for a show.

Accessibility Considerations

Through testing the app with several movie patrons, I learned a few aspects of the app that could improve the experience for people with visual imparments, as well as every other user of the app. A few key changes were creating icons to help make navigation easier, adding seat markers for those with disabilities to the seat selection design, and updating the background to a more contrasting color with the main text for claity.

Thoughts and Learnings

I’ve learned that even when you think you may have everything covered, feedback from others will help bring new ideas and better design with each revision. The usability studies were a great opportunity to see how others interact the designs I have created. I was surprised several times during the study to learn that an idea that I had wasn’t actually all that helpful after all and a much simpler solution would have worked. For example, I thought being able to see how many seats were left for an upcoming film would be a cool new feature that movie-goers could use to grab the last tickets fast! However, many people that tested the app didn’t care too much about that feature and it actually may have been a turn-off since it looked like the movie was going to be crowded.

Over all, creating this movie theater ticket buying design was a fun experience. I can see how this design can be incorporated in other products like streaming services. That is something I’d like to try to design going forward.