Town Square Theaters' ticket app lets users buy tickets seamlessly by cutting down the time spent during the purchasing process. It is an ad-free experience, with advance booking, hassle-free refunds, and in-app ticket scanning. Designed end-to-end through a goal-directed process, from user interviews to a functional high-fidelity prototype.
Town Square Theaters' ticket app is designed for the sale of tickets to Town Square's movie theaters, allowing users to purchase efficiently by cutting down on the time spent during the buying process. Its effectiveness can be measured by analyzing sales made through the app against sales made in person or through competitors.
For Town Square Theaters' design process I opted for a goal-directed approach that let me check reference points, stay on track, and meet deadlines efficiently. Qualitative research methods including user interviews and usability testing proved most effective.
Interviews shaped two primary personas — both busy professionals trying to make room for leisure without a lot of planning or time spent on logistics.
"In my free time I'd like to try to get out to the movies but honestly, sometimes I'd rather just rent a movie or watch something on TV."
"I would love to find more time for personal activities but I can't sacrifice my commitment to my students or my family."
To build a solid foundation for Town Square Theaters, I studied what the prominent movie-ticketing apps were already doing and which user goals they weren't reaching. I evaluated several features deemed vital by user surveys and identified which ones Town Square could capitalize on to gain a leg up.
The audit covered both direct and indirect competitors including Google, AMC, and Fandango. It was important to note what these companies did right and where they fell short. For example, none of these products appear to be ad-free and none offer a hassle-free refund policy for movie reservations resulting in more friction between users and their goals.
One of the earliest stages was developing the foundations the experience would be built on. A sitemap gave direction for the stages that followed, and a style guide defined the visual language every screen would share.
Town Square Theaters uses its "Movie Theater Red" scheme across platforms. Reds act as primary, secondary, and tertiary calls to action; neutrals carry backgrounds and text. The app uses Roboto in bold and regular weight, and buttons shift to #F55641 on activation. The goal: a consistent brand identity that can travel beyond the app.
After working out each app function on paper with quick hand-drawn wireframes, they were brought into Figma to be digitally fleshed out. From there, styles, brand standards, typefaces, and colors were applied to finalize the appearance of the product.
During lo-fi usability testing some users had trouble getting started. The home page was refined to offer multiple access points into the main user flow and easy navigation between screens.
Some users struggled to return to the homepage mid-flow. Many routes back were added including an option in the navigation menu, tapping the TsT logo at the top or bottom of any screen, and back buttons.
One user found this task "too difficult" and couldn't figure it out. The "change theaters" screen can now be reached from the profile menu or by tapping any theater name on any page.
Below is a clickable prototype of the Town Square Theaters ticket-purchasing app; built for research, testing, and review. Feel free to browse!
For Town Square Theaters I wanted to include all the best aspects of a ticket-purchasing app, but tailor them to the experience of buying tickets at a specific theater company without any hassle. Theater companies stand to gain from building their own purchasing experiences in-house with the user focused experience and UI polish of big ticketing apps.
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