PopCon App
PopCon is movie ticket mobile app for a fabricated Movie Theatre. On PopCon, users could expect to have a quick and intuitive user experience that takes the hassle out of planning friend group outings. With this being my first project ever, I was most curious to discover my strengths alongside areas of growth that needed extra attention in my design process.
Role/Service
UX/UI Design
Website
_
Sector
E-commerce
Defining the Goal
Let's define our goal…
Painting the Picture
I chose to tailor the PopCon app for college students in dire need of a study break. More specifically, I wanted to address the anxiety people feel about tickets being sold out upon our arrival.
Of course we could have just ordered the tickets online, but think about all the steps that one has to go through to do that:
Open the Safari browser on your phone.
Search for the Regal Cinema website.
Make sure your geo-locator is on, or else you have to enter your zip code for the site to find the nearest Regal to you.
Then, scroll down the uncoordinated list of movies on the movie list.
Select the movie you want to watch.
Select the date and time you want.
Select your seats
Type in your payment info and submit your payment
Close the app
Access the ticket in your email
Out of breath after reading all that? Me too. Time to roll up our sleeves!
Research + Empathizing
In order to empathize with the user cohort, I selected 4 peers of mine to conduct interviews.
User Personas
Kiara, 25
Education:
Master's Degree
Family:
Mother of 3
Hometown:
Riverside, CA
Occupation:
Full-time Student
Overview
Kiara is a Master's student who doesn't naturally have a lot of free time. When she does, she values every second. She fanciees cheap outings and is the "type A" friend. She always has a lot on her mind and values when she can make mindless decisions, but often aren't allowed.
Frustrations
Having to type in all her card information
paying too much for something
Stephen, 29
Education:
Bachelor's Degree
Family:
Single
Hometown:
Los Angeles, CA
Occupation:
Full-time Student
Overview
Stephen is a hard working young adult who really enjoys the breaks in his life he can find to be around his boys. He enjoys quality time with friends, and always appreciates when plans are made quickly and simply. He is admittedly impatient.
Frustrations
Technical difficulties and glitching
Waiting in line
Too many steps to completing an task
I made 2 user personas from the interviews. All my peers were students, 2 male, and 2 female. I interviewed each interviewee with the same list of 7 questions:
What is the most important feature you want in a ticketing app?
What’s been the most challenging thing about buying tickets online?
What’s the best part about buying tickets online?
What color(s) screams “cinema” to you?
What’s your favorite part about the movie-going experience?
Do you already know what movie you want to watch before you look to buy a ticket to a movie, or do you ever casually shop around?
What’s your favorite movie genre?
User Journey Maps
I built a journey map for my personas (Kiara and Stephen) to map out their feelings and experiences as they purchase a movie ticket on the app. Additionally, this would give me the opportunity to identify ways I could respond to their negative experiences and emotions with my hypothetical user flow. The most prominent emotion was impatience.
User Pain Points
Paint point 1
Users don't want a heavy cognitive load. The less steps the better.
Paint point 2
Users dislike long purchasing processes.
Paint point 3
Users feel insecure about their movie being sold out before they purchase.
Paint point 4
Expensive prices.
Testing
Let's do a competitive audit!
My next step consisted of conducting a competitive audit on 4 competitors (2 direct, 2 indirect) in the market: Fandango, MovieTickets.com, Ticketmaster and LiveNation. I wanted to learn how these apps/websites had responded to the user pain points, if at all. Likewise, the audit would be a great opportunity to gain some inspiration for my design.
Paint point 1
cluttered interfaces
Paint point 2
relatively long purchasing processes
Paint point 3
Poor visual design elements
View Audit
Defining the Goal
The problem at hand became clear…
Problem Statement
Stephen and Kiara are both busy people who need a hassle-free, time-saving way to buy movie tickets because they don’t like to waste valuable time and energy.
The Goal
The movie ticket app must let users that have little time to waste buy movie tickets in a quick and easy fashion.
Prototyping
Let's start designing.
I created a close up storyboard and user flow in order to inspire my design ideation and how I wanted to simplify things. One early decision I made was to allow the user to skip the seat selection step in the typical movie ticket user flow and automatically be assigned a seat on the app instead. This would shorten the time on task.
I also drew out some design layout ideas that included the information and features I determined would provide a more simple and seamless user flow, and shorten the time on task.
Digital wireframes & Lofi Prototypes
After working on my paper wireframes, I decided to build out a low-fidelity prototype and prepare for a usability study. The following are the 3 guiding principles I came up with to simplify and quicken the user journey:
Minimize number of pages
Give the user the option to skip “unnecessary” steps
Circumvent the entry of card information
Testing again
Usability Study
I conducted a moderated usability study with 5 participants. I sought after a diverse set of young adults ranging from 18-30 in age. All participants were students at a university/college, or employee that works at least 40 hours a week. I led the users through a scripted, step-by-step process to highlight any pain points.
The goal of my research was to find out if the app was intuitive and easy to navigate. Here are the findings I gathered:
Findings
Planned Design Response
Users want a clear next step given to them on the confirmation page.
Adding a QR ticket code ready for use to the confirmation page
Adding an “Add to wallet” button to the confirmation page
Users need the time and date of movie displayed onscreen during their checkout process.
Add date and time display to more pages in the checkout process
There is room to improve the app navigation.
Scrapping the sidebar navigation menu for a footer navigation menu
Reiterate
My next move was to develop my high-fidelity prototypes while reiterating my designs to respond to the insights from my usability study.
Mockups
Takeaways & Next Steps
Here are a few takeaways from my time on this project
What I learned
It was challenging for me to ideate ways that quickened the ticket purchasing process. I’m aware that some of my solutions might not be valuable to some users. For example, some users always want to pick where they can sit in the theater and may not trust the app to pick the best available for them, making my skip to checkout feature useless. Nevertheless, I believe the best solutions I offered came from optimizing the app navigation with genre filters and a footer navigation menu, along with simplifying individual steps.
Next Steps
I carried the goal of wanting to shorten the user’s time on task, however I did not implement this KPI into my usability study. It’s likely that my design would have a shorter time on task considering the simple addition of Apple Pay and and optimized navigation, however if I tested this I would have been able to determine more accurately if my efforts to make my app “quick” were effective.
My next step in this project is to conduct another usability study that will compare the time on task users have on my app to my competitors and explore ways for users to link their accounts with their friends to allow voting polls on the showtimes that align with their schedules.
Thanks for reading 🧑🏾🦲
Back to top