Time: May 2021
Role: Product designer / researcher / manager / developer
Tools: Figma, React.js

Introduction

There is an increasing trend of attendance in events and experiences in the new generations, in which there is a tendency to place higher value in non-tangible things than in materialistic goods. While streaming has disrupted the media industry, movie theaters continue to serve as a central social meeting or gathering point, maybe even more so in a post-pandemic era when people are itching for social interactions.

I actually am not an avid movie-goer. As a kid, the only reason I’d go to the movies was because there was a program in school in which if you got straight A’s on your report card, you’d get a set of freebies at the local mall, including a free movie ticket. Other than that, it was only for special occasions, like a birthday. And this was all pre-electronic tickets. So the movie experience has not been a habitual part of my life, even in recent years. But the few times I have gone and purchased through an online platform, I’ve found it very. very. annoying.

When the coronavirus pandemic happened, the entertainment industry adapted, and movie theaters became a no-go. The hackathon came at a time when vaccines were starting to roll out in the United States, and it was the perfect opportunity to evaluate Fandango’s core product - ticketing - and analyzing what makes me ‘ugh’ about purchasing online. From the get-go, my persona is not the main market for the movie ticketing industry. The best audience would be the frequent attendees, the ones that chase the premiere releases and are invested in the cinematic universe (ie. Marvel, Disney, etc.). But I believe that if the process of ticketing is not even streamlined for an infrequent user, it is not any better of an experience for a regular user.

Market Research

First, we looked into what makes a movie experience what it is today. Was it the 50-foot screen for the visual enthusiasts? The latest movie premiere exclusively in theaters? The surround sound for the audiophiles? The luxury recliners at select theaters? The sneak peek trailers? The tubs of butter popcorn and soda? While all of these do make up the experience, taking myself as the user in question, I identified that for myself, movie theaters were a meeting point and social activity with some friends and/or a place for me to catch a movie release. With how much social activities have transformed over the past decade, I thought about improving ticketing for groups. And especially with the pandemic forcing adoption of electronic payments and the post-pandemic itch for social normalcy, the question was how can ticketing be part of the new norm?

The immediate thought was a feature that would allow friends and families to plan and book tickets, all within the app. We reached out to internal UX researchers to get an idea of what research has been done before. While building out an entire social feature is plausible, research found that there wasn’t a strong business driver for it, since people tended to plan on whatever platform suited their group, whether it be Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage, etc. It was also noted that the majority of users tended to purchase as a family or as a group of 2. While making the experience more group-friendly isn’t new, tackling the group planning aspect was shown to be complex in practice without enough business need.

In a competitive analysis, the biggest direct competitor would probably be Atom Tickets, and the key to their business strategy is to focus on personalization, recommendation, and social aspects of advanced ticketing. Each app has its own strength and weaknesses:

	Fandango	Atom Tickets
Pros	Established user-base Extensive partnerships and promotions Guest checkout	Sleek design Allows individual QR codes Share links with friends to book seats together
Cons	Built in the 2000s Lacks social media and group aspects of the 2010s	Limited rewards and theater selection No guest checkout Allows group ticketing but only allows people to book seats adjacent to each other

A key part of creating an experience is to reduce the friction to get from Point A to Point B. The movie ticketing experience consists of the available theater, movie, time, and seating. While the two apps focused on different business strategies, they both had pretty standard user flows, tending to go either from movie or theater -> selecting a time -> selecting seats -> payment. I also tried to look at ticketing platforms in other countries. Most, if not all, movie ticketing apps streamlined the first three elements, and seating tended to be part of the transactional flow. The seating chart itself was on a new page, which takes the user out of all of the different options of movies and theaters and times available, and there wasn’t an easy way to see what was available without going back and forth.

A huge part of advanced ticketing has to do with what seats a user can secure - people have a high willingness to change their time, movie, and theater selection based on the seats that are available. After all, how often do we hear about how great it is to be super close to a 50-foot screen with loud surround-sound speakers?

And bingo! That was where we’d focus our attention.

Analysis

Looking at all of Fandango’s ticketing businesses, all follow the following format:

Additional friction gets added to the Fandango experience because all the sites redirect to tickets.fandango.com, probably for ease of managing tickets across all the businesses.

We also received some internal data (confidential) that had significant drop-off percentages (> 40%) between the Seat Picker and Checkout pages for both ticket buyers and ticket non-buyers as well as desktop and mobile users. There was also a tendency to restart the checkout process more than once after arriving at the seat selection step.

Solution

Currently, there’s no way to tell what the seating is like for a specific theater, which makes it extremely cumbersome both as an individual and as a group. The goal was to give users a preview of the seating arrangement for the theater / auditorium before they get redirected to the ticketing page, per Fandango’s existing ticketing flow.

With the hustle and bustle nature of a hackathon, we chose to target something that was simple but effective, something that could potentially roll out within the next couple months that would both be valuable to customers as well as align with Fandango’s existing business models.

I hacked together this design on Figma as a visual representation with the following key elements:

• Mobile and web friendly
• Left-right toggling between seat maps for the same day
• Details of the selection
• Pricing transparency
• Seat map transparency (availability, number of seats remaining)

We came across some difficulties, such as:

• Limitations on internal APIs provided for the hackathon
• Limited access to existing visual assets for prototyping
• Limited knowledge / insight from the hackathon team. 1 out of 5 worked directly in Fandango ticketing.

The hackathon end-product prototype was built on React and contained the core elements of our design. Take a look at our prototype!

Changes don’t have to be large or complex to make a big impact. With Fandango being a very dominant presence in the U.S. movie ticketing industry, a small change can go a long way.

Future Improvements

Of course, this is step 1 of streamlining the Fandango ticketing experience. While prototyping, we also identified enhancements to our seat picking preview popup as well as other pain points / business opportunities in the ticketing experience:

• Tap into consumer/millenial sense of FOMO by having an indicator of seat availability, especially for popular screenings / show times (ie. X seats left, ‘Running low’ messaging or icon)
• Add scale or depth perception to the seating chart map (ie. meters between screen and seats) since every theater and room has a different layout
• Improving on the social aspect of ticketing by offering option to reserve for friends to purchase within X hours or splitting into individual QR codes
• Tap into the dating scene since movies are still a common date activity
• Group planning feature available to both Fandango and non-Fandango members (ie. compare and contrast feature)