Date:
November 30, 2017
Role:
Lead Designer
Our cinema customers wanted to capitalize on booming smartphone usage among their clients, so our team wanted to create a first-class native mobile app that could be easily themed and rolled out for our clients.
App development is hard, especially for small to medium business like cinemas who are more focused on having a great in person experience. Competing with large international chains when it comes to digital experience, especially mobile, is all about differentiating yourself.To add to the challenge, our company works with cinemas in multiple countries and languages, so our app had to support localization and regional considerations.
Our team knew there was a way that we could develop a world-class moviegoer experience and make that available to the regional and local cinema groups to give them and their customers the best experience, while still maintaining a SaaS model that enabled us to easily maintain multiple deployments while still providing the customization to make the app feel like "theirs".
After talking with our customers and cinema patrons, we found that the biggest desires for a dedicated mobile app came down to 3 main things.
On the cinema owner side, the biggest desires were to have it be integrated with their POS and require minimal upkeep.
With our goals in sight, the product team got together in our LA office and worked through the various personas and use-cases of the average movie-goer. We also began to work on how we could drive value for our customers, because their growth was directly tied to our own.
Like most small businesses, Point of Sale options in the cinema industry are plentiful. Each vendor has it's strength and weaknesses and each one had vastly different integration capabilities and APIs available. This led to some challenges with making sure that all of the features we wanted to have in the app (ordering tickets, food & beverage, rewards, refunds, etc.)
Once we had some high-fidelity mock-ups, we were able to do some user testing with consumers to ensure that our workflows and features were easy to navigate and simple to use.
After a few rounds of iterations and testing, we had a basic feature set and enough data to move forward with development of the initial release, along with a backlog of ideas and user flows for future enhancements, such as Food & Beverage ordering.