Overview:
As a part of Google UX Design Professional Certificate I was tasked with creating a seat reservation app for a movie theater.
For the sake of this project I created a fictional Pangea Movie Theater and designed a web mobile app for this cinema. The goal was to put extra emphasis on the accessibility of the application.
Role:
Product designer - for this project I was responsible for all aspects of the design process. That included: User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping and Testing.
Background:
In January of 2023 I enrolled in an online course Google UX Design Professional Certificate. During the first 5 segments of a course I learned a classic design thinking framework, which allowed me to create an app from beginning to end.
The prompt for the design was randomly generated and in my case the prompt stated: “Design a seat reservation app for a movie theater.” Since no other details were provided I came up with a fictional movie theater located in Warsaw, called Kino Pangea.
Creation of the movie theater was based on previously done user research, competitive audit and demographic reports about the city of Warsaw. While conducting a competitive audit of movie theaters apps and websites I noticed that very few of them supported a language other than Polish. As it turns out, according to the demographic report from 2021, currently in Warsaw lives and works approximately 45 thousand people of foreign origin, and this number will likely increase in the upcoming years. Additionally, movie theater websites often have small, non responsive mobile web versions that do not allow users selecting preferred font size or color contrast.
Hypothetical Kino Pangea was an answer to the discovered pain points. It would be a movie theater where movies in different language versions would be shown. The goal of the project was to create a highly accessible app that would support the unique business model of the fictional movie theater.
Gathering insights:
Interviews with potential users were conducted, as well as a competitive audit. Various “artifacts” were created as a result of the user research, such as personas, user journey maps, empathy maps, etc. All of them informed later design stages.
Persona created for this project. I also made an illustration of the persona, and I think it’s neat.
Initial wireframe of the app was created, then lo-fi prototype, which was used for usability study.
The first series of usability study was greatly informative. It provided information about issues with the app. After gathering insights from the study a few themes presented themselves, thanks to the “affinity mapping” method.
Affinity diagram for preparing insights from user research.
In the study, among other things, I learned that a few icons used in the design were confusing to the users. There was one problem with wording in one of the pages. Few participants of the study expected certain features of the application to be incorporated in the design, like an option to select different type of payment. Another thing that all of the tested users agreed on was that this product would be best developed as a responsive web app, rather than a dedicated mobile app.
Initial mockup of the app.
After that it was time to iterate on the design, by using newly discovered insights. Creating high-fidelity mockup have begun.
Narrowing down the scope of work:
I focused on creating pages for a simple task flow of users buying tickets via app. This allowed me to keep a workload manageable. The majority of people that are nationality other than Polish come from Ukraine, then Belarus and Vietnam, and ultimately I wanted the app to support all of those languages. For the sake of this prototype I focused on only one language.
Mockups
I chose a simple aesthetic, reminiscent of the brutalist websites. I went for high contrast between all elements - verified with WebAIM website. I tried to make the design simple and easy to scale, since it should support different font sizes.
Mockups of the Kino Pangea app, version 1.
Validating the designs and iteration:
Another round of usability testing was conducted. After that some changes in the design were made. For example, an original title of the movie was provided below a title in the selected language.
Mockups of the Kino Pangea app, version 2.
Font sizes comparison.
Moving forward:
In the end I found it difficult to let this project go. It was a fun thought experiment, and it made me wish that a movie theater of this type existed in Warsaw. I was still thinking about additional features this app should provide - like an option to filter through the movies based on your language preferences.
The final round of usability study also provided a great deal of insights, what should be the next steps with app development. For example, high contrast of the elements were good for text readability, but it was also eye-straining for a long run. Additional features like dark mode and contrast reduction should be provided.
I learned a lot during this project, even though I can see that I still have a lot to learn as a UX designer.
Below you may find the prototype for Kino Pangea movie theater app.
Thank you for your attention.
