Cineworld: eCommerce Website
Streamling interaction design
Insight:
Ironing out wrinkles in user journeys and improving visual design resulted in a 20% increase in online sales
Prior to starting on this project to re-vamp and improve Cineworld’s eCommerce experience, I (naively) believed that selling cinema tickets online was a fairly basic operation. It wasn’t.
User needs and desires combined and multiplied with business situations made finding a film and buying tickets a potential nightmare. Films, of course, can play at multiple locations throughout a cinema chain, but sometimes a single location will have multiple cinemas. Then films play at different times of the day, with different prices for different types of customers (children, adults seniors etc.). As well, films can be enhanced with a number of other services, audio description, autism-friendly, subtitles, 3D and so on. And on top of all this, pricing must be displayed for discount / loyalty schemes and food purchases.
But getting it right – keeping it simple – resulted in +27% new visits -11% bounce rates and approximately 20% more ticket sales online.
The brief
I arrived mid-way within Sprint 4 of this project. The previous UX Manager had departed suddenly and Cineworld stakeholders needed a UX Manager / interaction designer to work alongside its in-house team, external development and user insight partners.
My role
Multiple responsibilities:
- Management of an external development partner
- responsibility for enhancements to interaction design / wireframes
The project process
For this project the day-to-day involved focusing on key functionality prioritised within 2 week sprints. I worked alongside product owners, agile scrum masters and developers to agree the focus of each sprint and then to collectively move forward to write produce Agile Epics and Stories to be coded as working solutions within each iteration.
While search and browse journeys were obviously important, the component which required the most work and care was the booking process, where customers selected and committed to purchase.
Outcomes / results
The Cineworld eCommerce rebuild resulted in significant business improvements.
When compared to the busiest periods of the previous year, the new site demonstrated:
- + 25% page views
- + 27% visits
- +10% new visitors
- + 25% average visitors / day
- -11% bounce rate
- and an overall increase in sales of approx. 20%
