Making the trip to the movies start earlier

I set myself a brief: a cinema chain in Lebanon wants to redesign its mobile app so that booking is easier and its offers actually reach people. Before drawing anything, I needed to understand why people who like movies still hesitate to go.

Why was booking frustrating? Why couldn't people make a quick decision?

My starting assumption was simple. Most reasons people give for staying home can be solved, they just don't know it yet. The research was there to find out which reasons were real.

I wrote a research plan with clear objectives: how people learn about movies, how they choose a theater, how they buy tickets today, and what bothers them most across the whole trip, from the sofa to the seat.

I interviewed 18 adults: couples, parents, people who go alone and groups of friends. The script moved from warm-up, to how they deal with the problem today, to the workarounds they already use.

I tested the script and changed it.
After the first two interviews I reviewed the recordings with a mentor and rewrote the weak questions. One question kept getting answers about the film instead of the theater, so I reworded it around the experience. Another invited wishful answers, so I replaced it with "if you were in charge of this cinema, what would you change?". I also offered Arabic as an option, so people answered in the language they think in.

I audited four apps screen by screen: two local cinema apps (VOX and Grand Cinemas) and two international ones (Fandango and BookMyShow). For each I noted the offering, first impression, features, reviews and where the flow breaks.

• Local apps repeat work. One asks for your name, email and phone again at checkout even when you are signed in, and the price only updates after you confirm your seats.
• Each app covers one chain. You cannot compare theaters, and store reviews complain that you can't see which location shows which movie.
• Fandango shows the decision in one view. Day, showtime and seat availability sit together, and you can ask to be told when tickets go on sale.
• BookMyShow makes seats fast but the app crowded. Tapping a row fills your seats, yet the amount of content makes it hard to find your way.

The gap was clear: nobody locally lets you compare theaters, formats and seats in one place.

I pulled every relevant quote onto a sticky note, tagged it with the participant and question, then grouped the notes by meaning. Nine themes came out. The starred note in each group is the quote that says it best.

Distance picks the theater, the format breaks the rule.
People go to the theater closest to home. The exception is a film worth seeing in IMAX, and then they struggle to find where and when it plays.

The audience makes or breaks the night.
The largest group of notes was about noise, phones and kids. Several people already choose late or weekday showings to avoid a full room.

People want to pay online, and can't.
Cards fail, some sites only take local-currency cards, and many fall back to reserving by phone and paying cash at the counter.

Two queues for one movie.
One line for tickets, another for popcorn. People called it a waste of time and arrive early just to stand in both.

Offers exist but nobody sees them.
Price matters, yet people only learn about offers once they are standing in the theater.

People needed a faster way to compare theaters, and a booking flow that didn't make them go looking.

I developed two primary personas that represent the majority of the people I spoke to. Analyzing their behavior and goals let me keep asking the critical question: am I designing the right product?

I mapped each persona's journey step by step, from deciding to watch a movie to leaving the theater, with what they do, think and feel at each stage.

Sinon's low point is committing to a booking: he can't pay online and worries about a noisy room. Yasser's comes later: the queue for snacks, then a noisy room. The bottom row of each map lists the opportunities, and those became the screens below.

The core of the solution is a single booking screen. Dates, nearby theaters, showtimes and seats sit together, so a decision takes one pass instead of several.

• Theaters are listed side by side, with the favorite one open first
• IMAX showings are tagged on the showtime itself
• Seat availability is visible before committing to a time
• The screen takes its color from the movie's artwork, so every movie page feels like its own

The booking screen answered the comparison problem. Five more screens answer the other findings, one finding each. Pick one to see what I heard and what I designed for it.