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Kingston Theatre
Designing a seat reservation app to help Kingston Theatre compete with the features offered by larger movie chains.
Role
Product Designer
Duration
April ’22 – May ’22
This work is NDA-Protected. Please contact me if you'd like to learn more.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic arrived an increased consumer awareness regarding the importance of supporting local, small businesses. Many people are attempting to select smaller businesses in their everyday spending choices. Kingston Theatre is one such movie theatre that students and locals alike enjoy supporting.
This selection comes at a cost for some users, however, as they must sacrifice the convenience of booking online and reserving seats ahead of time. To help Kingston Theatre compete with the features offered by larger movie chains in Kingston, I designed a booking and seat reservation app.
This project was completed as part of Google’s UX Design Certificate program.
User Research
I searched through user feedback on existing movie theatre mobile apps to find anecdotal customer data. I interviewed current and past Kingston Theatre users to identify their motivations and frustrations when booking theatre tickets.
I extracted key insights from this research to develop user personas, a journey map and storyboard indicating areas of opportunity.
I then completed a competitive audit, comparing the user experience of multiple competitor’s websites and mobile apps. Synthesizing all of this, I derived three key pain points:
Lack of Reservation Feature
Users must attempt to arrive early to theatres in order to find desirable seats.
Lack of Efficiency
Absence of e-tickets means unnecessary time spent checking-in.
High-Friction
Existing reservation apps offer poor user interfaces with limited accessibility and no customization.
Ideation
How might we design a frictionless reservation app to increase booking efficiency?
Designs focused on seamless user flows, integrating the seat reservation feature with the usual steps to book tickets from within a theatre app.
Usability Testing
The low-fidelity app prototype for Kingston Theatre was tested and can be viewed here.
Research Questions
1) Are users able to successfully reserve the seat they want?
2) What can we learn about the app flow from the steps the user takes?
3) Is there a particular part of the process that users get stuck on?
4) Is the payment process easy for users?
Participants
5 participants
Participants are between the ages of 20-58 and reside in metropolitan or suburb areas.
Participants visit movie theatres at least 4 times a year.
Methodology
25-30 minutes Canada, remote
Moderated usability study
Users were asked to complete a movie booking on a low-fidelity prototype. They were then asked to answer a few follow-up questions and complete an SUS questionnaire.
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Findings & Next Steps
Using affinity mapping, I identified a few different themes from the usability test and used these to iterate on the wireframes before developing the hi-fidelity designs.
The result was a mobile application for seamless ticket booking & seat reservation that builds trust with local Kingston Theatre users. View the final designs here.
Upon release, the app can be measured using the following success metrics:
User Satisfaction
Change in overall satisfaction surveys
% time reduction in start-to-end booking process
User Retention
Number of returning customers per quarter
User Acquisition
Number of new customers booking through app and visiting Kingston Theatre per quarter
As the app gains users, further testing should be conducted to determine areas of opportunity. New and advanced features such as mid-movie snack ordering may be implemented to help drive new customer acquisition, loyalty and conversion.
Key Learnings/ Takeaways
As this was my first end-to-end UX project, I was completing interviews and usability tests for the first time. The interview dialogue demonstrated how users may not often elaborate on their thoughts unprompted. The question, “how would you improve this process?”, rarely yielded fruitful insight as users themselves did not seem aware of exactly why the product wasn’t working for them. Simply asking, “why?”, following users’ indications of pain points would often reveal deeper, actionable data regarding their thoughts, feelings and frustrations while navigating the prototype.
