Bookmyshow - A UX case study

Going to the movies, an experience most of us love and enjoy. The joy of grabbing that popcorn, finding your seat, getting immersed in the cinematic experience. What’s not to love. Well, maybe the booking process. These are my thought on the user experience of Bookmyshow, the most widely used app in India to book tickets to movies, shows and a lot more. An avid cinema enthusiast myself, I am on their app every weekend, wanting to explore the movies I wanna go to, but find it quite confusing to decide on something.

The problem statement?

Going to the cinema is a fun experience. So why shouldn’t the booking process for the same be pleasant as well? How can we reimagine the future of the ticket booking experience.

A subtle disclaimer before we begin - I am not associated or linked to Bookmyshow in any way. These are my opinions as an aspiring UX researcher and I hope it will be received by its readers in the way it should be :).

The process

As always, a proper UX research should go about in the most strategic and cyclic way. So lets go through my process step by step.

1) The Research - Understand how users experience the product and its competitors

My insights and competitive analysis -

I conducted a survey by reaching out to multiple friends and acquaintances of various age groups and various genders. I recorded the responses from 16 people in total. I discovered how they go about in their movie ticket booking experience. What they want. What they don’t understand about it and how I can make their lives easier. Another goal of this research was to understand whether any of them have used a competitors service to book a show. But surprisingly, only a few of them had used another service and all of those services were proprietary apps or websites of the movie theatres they chose such as PVR or Inox. Those services did not possess the capability to book tickets at any theatre of your choice. Only their own locations.

On further prying, I discovered another service called ticketnew.com, a website very similar to bookmyshow. But unsurprisingly, none of my survey participants had even heard about it (Neither had I before). It was not surprising as the website has a very outdates interface and does not feel appealing or inviting towards users from both a UI and UX perspective.

So Bookmyshow has that covered. It has a strong user base who use their services over and over without even looking for a different option. But what can be improved? Let’s look at some of the user personas I created after listening to the woes of my survey participants.

User Personas (Names have been replaced for privacy reasons) -

1) Arjun Kapoor

Arjun is a content creator based in Bangalore who is an avid movie enthusiast. He uses Bookmyshow to book tickets but is disappointed at the lack of personalised movie suggestions. He is also frustrated with the amount of steps it takes to buy tickets and wishes there was someway to make it quicker. Arjun deserves a better movie booking experience doesn’t he?

2) Divya Menon

Divya is a student hailing from Chennai, Tamilnadu. She specifically pointed out an occurrence as her pain point with Bookmyshow - She and her friends were really looking forward to watching the Avengers movie. She was checking the Bookmyshow app frequently to know whether bookings or pre bookings have begun. She expressed her interest in the movie by clicking on the interested button. But she still missed out on the movie on the first day as she was not notified about the opening of the bookings and was not able to check out fast enough to reserve her seats.

2) The Pain Points

So from the user personas and user interviews, I was able to compile a list of pain points. To list them,

Lack of personalised movie suggestions : Today, everything we use daily is catered to our interests and habits, be it reels on Instagram or the ads we get on YouTube. So why can’t Bookmyshow suggest movies that is in line with the interests of a specific user?

Slow checkout process : A lot of the participants felt that the checkout process after selecting their seats were long and included unnecessary forms and tasks.

Hard to book tickets for highly anticipated movies : Users found it difficult to book for movies that have been highly anticipated and are difficult to get tickets for as there was no proper channel of notification when ticket bookings open.

So based on these points, I gathered the understanding that though Bookmyshow is a great service that is used everyday by millions of users, there are key aspects of their process that can be improved majorly.

3) User Flow

This is the user flow that should exist in a ticket booking app. There is no over complications. It should be a simple and easy to understand process that anybody irrespective of their age should be taken through.

Ideation - Design

I arrived upon the following solutions to improve the user experience of Bookmyshow,

(I’ll be comparing the old design and the new improved mockups down below)

1) Personalised Movie Suggestions

The current screen you are greeted with when you open the Bookmyshow app shows “Recommended Movies” according to what’s popular at the moment. Not catered to its specific users. So I felt a collection of data from the user during onboarding about their preferences would help cater movies to them better.

During Onboarding the user is asked to select their favourite genres, their favourite movie actors and actresses, and a couple of their favourite movies. The user can search for specific instances of all of the above too using the search button. The user has also been given the option to skip selecting their preferences and both the skip and continue buttons have been placed at the bottom of the screen for ease of clickability and to reduce cognitive load.

On the home page, I also replaced the “Recommended Movies” tab with “Movies We Think You’ll Enjoy” where movies that are selected based on the previously collected preference data are shown to the user in order. So that’s the first thing the user sees. I renamed the “Recommended Movies” to “Popular Movies” and placed it underneath the best events of the week tab as let’s not forget bookmyshow isn’t just a movie booking service even though that’s what it used for the most.

2) In app pre-booking

From the pain points collected before from my research, I deduced a feature that could prove useful for many users. It is a pre-booking of sorts for any movie before its release and before the booking for it starts.

Let me try to explain it as a use case scenario. Let’s suppose you wanna watch a Marvel movie that is to be released next week. It’s been much awaited by millions of fans and you are sure it’ll be a hassle to obtain tickets for it as tickets will be sold out within minutes. So with this feature, before the booking starts, you will be able to click on a show interest button where you can select a couple of preferred theatres where you’d like to watch the movie, select a date for when you are planning to watch the movie and then select a time slot such as between “12 PM - 3 PM” for when you are planning to watch the movie. So now, when the bookings open at the selected theatres the user will be notified about it and when the notification is clicked upon they’ll be taken to a screen where only the options that were pre selected is shown to the user for a faster checkout process.

3) The checkout process

The current checkout process consists of several steps that seems wasteful for a movie booking process. After selecting the seats for your movie, you are taken to a page to enter your email and phone number. This seems wasteful as the user is already logged in to Bookmyshow and the app already possesses the data that its asking for. Then the user is taken to a page where they can pre purchase food items to be collected at the theatre before the movie. Then finally the user is taken to the payment page.

Like I said the above process seems long and wasteful and can be made more efficient. In my redesign, I removed the page that asks for the users Email and Phone number as that data must already exists in the app. The users are able to edit the same on the checkout page if need be. I removed the food menu page that is forced upon every user and made it into a button on the seat selection page where users can either click on selecting the food along with the seats or skip that page entirely and continue to check out.

Here are a few other takeaways I gained from the whole process as well :

• Ease of use: The application should be easy for users to navigate and use, with clear calls to action and a logical flow from start to finish.

• Accessibility: The application should be accessible to users with disabilities, including those who use assistive technologies such as screen readers.

• Personalization: The application should allow users to customize their experience, such as by saving their favorite theaters or selecting preferred seating.

• Payment options: The application should offer a variety of payment options, such as credit card, debit card, and mobile payments, to make it easy for users to purchase tickets.

• Confirmation and notifications: The application should provide clear confirmation of ticket purchases, as well as timely notifications about showtimes and other important information.

• Customer service: The application should provide easy access to customer service, such as through a live chat feature or a phone number, in case users have questions or need assistance.

3) Reflections

Having worked on this project on my own, I feel the app improvements have only been under one person’s POV. I am sure with the support of a team more ideas and more improvements could have been discovered and worked upon. This project will still need a great deal of time and hard work to implement the solutions as well. But I am grateful I could use my creativity to arrive upon these conclusions and document them in the best way possible.

Thank you for taking the time to go through my case study and reaching the end. Please reach out to me for any queries or for any of your suggestions.