User experience

Use cases, not screens.

I began with 3 stakeholders interviews to understand the business requirements and define key performance indicators (KPIs). A full market research wasn't needed to move forward.

Instead, I started the user research process by conducting 1 individual interview session, 1 online survey, and 1 full day spent in the Cinema lobby observing customers and taking notes.

The goal of this exercise was to gather data about customer's behaviour, goals, and pain points.

User interview

I started to develop user stories and use-cases with a clear focus on user goals and finding pain points. The findings were used to evaluate design decisions.

User stories

I believe that the current model of defining user stories is broken. Something like "As a user, I want to buy a ticket, so I can access the cinema" doesn’t tell me anything about how the person chooses the movie (knows the title from the start or needs help to discover what's playing), if the hour is a filtering criterion, whether they need 1 or more tickets, and so on.

To inform design, user stories have to tell a story about the person using the product. The person becomes central, not the product. The product exists only to create the tools for her to achieve her goals. Real life goals.

The following are the user stories used into my decision‐making process:

As a single mom, I want to take the kids out to the movies. My kids want to see Spider-Man tonight. As a high school guy that just escaped the friend zone, I want to take my new GF to a date. It should be a Romantic Comedy sometime Saturday. As a hard-working, always busy husband and father of three kids, I want to spend some quiet time with my wife. I scheduled 3 hours next Tuesday evening, the title doesn't matter much. My friends and I as movie lovers, don't want to miss an Opening. I have a Membership Card and I value all the offers and discounts.

From this exercise, it became clear that we could help customers derive more value from the product if we offered multiple ways to find a movie. My focus moved from "thinking in steps and screens" to "thinking in goals and functionality", basically to understand and map the product interactions from user's point of view. Furthermore, the findings helped me to create critearia for measuring design success.

Product features

The next step was to translate the user stories into use cases.

User Task Action Discover Find movie by Title Search, Scroll list Find movies by Genre Filter list Find movies by Date & Time Filter list Find Openings Filter, Scroll list Showcase Decide if Yes/No Explore, Share movie details Book/Buy Select showtime Checkout Choose tickets Select options Choose seats Select options Use Enter cinema Show barcode Set reminder Add to calendar Add guests Share ticket

Sections overview