Campus Theatre for Movie Buffs
Introduction
We set out in this project to create a mobile application for the campus theatre, a small, single screen art-deco theater in Lewisburg, targeting movie buffs as our audience. To do this, we needed to do research into what movie buffs actually want out of their applications, and our primary conclusion was that what they liked doing more than anything was talking about movies. So our design chose to focus on the social aspects of moviegoing. Users can rate, review, or just talk about the movies they’ve seen at the Campus, or the movies they’re excited to see. They can keep track of upcoming movies to the campus so they never miss a new movie. Movie buffs tend not to be discriminate on what movies they’ll go watch, but very discriminate on what movies they like.
Research
What is a movie buff?
We researched what makes a movie goer a movie buff and highlighted some key points in our idea board.
What do movie buffs like?
We began examining what our users would be interested in by attempting to pull connections from the information users of sites like IMDB, moviemistakes.com, and PassThePopcorn. Some patterns we discovered were that movie buffs broadly like to discuss new releases, and what they see as “classics” which are movies which more or less fit into the categories of foreign films, silent films, and popular hits of the past few decades.
We continued by deciding our great concern was that the movie buff is primarily interested in interacting with a community of like-minded people to discuss the films they enjoy.
Other options we explored:
Sketching
After formulating our ideas, we started sketching them. Our extensive research of what movie buffs care about allowed us to make designs we thought would be beneficial to them. We wanted to have a way for the users to feel like they were contributing to and interacting with the movie viewing community as opposed to just viewing the movie. This is where we thought of the idea for a feed page as well as a profile page. This would allow users to express their opinions as well as see which movies they have already watched and maybe even compete among other movie buffs to see who has watched more movies.
A movie buff keeps track of the movies they have watched and movies they want to watch, so it was important for us to include a way for them to know this. We implemented a wishlist to allow users to keep a list of movies.
We needed a way to display the movies that were playing as well as ones that are coming up in the future. Originally we wanted to do a sliding page, where users could slide to see the current and future movies but decided against it since it would create confusion. Instead we used the “See a Movie” tab to display these different options.
Style
We needed fonts and colors that were minimalist and set a calm mood for the users. Below are the fonts, the colors and the mood board we used to create our design.
- Calisto MT
- Niagara Solid
- Georgia
The Final Product
Split into four tabs:
- See a movie — lets you buy a ticket, reserve a seat, see upcoming movies. Add movies you’re interested in to your watchlist
- Feed — discussion feed of your friends’ posts to their profiles, where you can interact with your friends
- Profile — Your profile within the app. Discuss your opinions on movies and write reviews and ratings.
- About Us — information about the campus theatre
Strengths — consistent design, personal, quick and easy, cool and edgy, clean design, good navigation
Weakness — small fonts, no variation among star icons, perhaps it doesn’t require the relationship with the campus theatre, the future page is cluttered.
A few things to consider for the next time would be to make the design simpler. We were a little too ambitious with our design and wanted to include as much as we could. We could reduce the amount of information in a single page and make the icons and text larger.
Conclusion
Overall, we think it was pretty challenging to create a movie app for movies buffs considering how movie buffs would be very specific in what they were looking for in said app, however we think that our app turned out great. Through all of our research on the typical movie buff and getting a sense of how they think and feel, we were able to tailor an app to the movie buffs that would cater to every need that we saw the movie buff would require. It allows the user to get tons of information of movies, times and dates, and even what their peers have been watching and saying about the movies they’ve watched. It also allows for them to voice their own opinions through forums, comments, and ratings which we thought to be a vital experience to the movie buff user. It took a lot of prototyping and scratching, and creation and deletion but in the end we finished up with a prototype that we feel quenches any desires a movie buff would want in their app.
