UI/UX Case Study : Designing booking flow for Bookmyshow

Building Design with data

BookMyShow (Founded in 2007) has grown leaps and bounds and is now becoming the one stop shop for everything entertainment; offering it’s users content such as music, videos, podcasts and even holds its own concerts and live events.

BookMyShow recently underwent a complete redesign — the goal being to increase user conversions. In order to do this, we reduced the number of steps of booking a movie from 14 elaborate steps to just 7. We saw our conversions increase by 50%.

The Problem:

Even though we got it down to 7 steps, the process of booking a movie was still time consuming and tedious.

To plan for a show, users have to first decide which movie they want to watch. Post this decision, they have to choose the date and which cinema they would like to go to and the showtime for the movie. This process often requires some back and forth in order to settle on the ideal date, venue and time. They then have to choose the number of the seats and the availability of their desired seats. This long process can often be tedious when making ad-hoc plans.

User Stories:

In order to build realistic user stories, I surveyed the top 10 transactors of BookMyShow through Secret Society. These users were aged between 18 to 35, and go to the theatre at least once a week. The questions focused on their experience of booking a movie. The main takeaways were as follows:

1. Five users said they always book 2 tickets, so either they go with a friend, their better half or with a family member.
2. Eight users said they always go to their favourite cinema, so they were looking for the best movie available at that venue.
3. Five users said they usually go to the cinema at a specific time of the day during the week.
4. All of them said they prefer specific seats, so they would change cinemas or even the date to get the required seats.
5. What was interesting was that all of them had different seat preferences.
6. Nine users said they book tickets on the same day of the show.

Pain Points:

I created a few open-ended interview questions to understand the major pain points of my target audience. Some of the findings are below:

1. 8/10 users complained about not getting the seats of their choice after going through the entire process.
2. 4/10 users complained about the quantity selection screen to be irrelevant.
3. 6/10 users still complained that the process feels long.
4. Other complaints included the app’s slow speed or bugs resulting in errors.

Solution

It wouldn’t be fair to our users to simply include all the 7 steps on one screen and say, “Here you go! We solved it.” Instead we take one step and a time. We relied on data to validate every step we cut down, and eventually made it a 1–2 click booking.

So we started with series of experiments by inserting small components (kinda widget) on different screens.

Suggested Solution

1. Pre Selection of a Movie

We got data on our user’s movie-watching preferences and mapped each type of user in a specific bucket. Some users only watched english language movies, where as some only watched movies based on their rating. Based on their last transactions, genre selections, and overall browsing patterns we started preselecting the movie for the user. This took them directly to the showtimes page. Ofcourse, the user had an option to change the movie, on the same page itself. Here are some of the key takeaways were:

Here are some of the key point

1. 8/10 users ended up going to the same movie which was preselected for them.
2. Remaining complained that they couldn’t figure out how to change the movie from the showtime page.

2. Pre Selection of a cinema and quantity

Our data highlighted that 88% of users end up going to their favourite cinema. Our next step was to preselect the cinema and get the showtimes on the seat layout.

1. The quantity of seats that were pre-decided was based on the previous transaction of the user.

This experiment was crucial as we were cutting down 3 major steps.

Some of the key takeaways were:

1. 7/10 users changed the showtimes on the seat layout to check availability.
2. 10/10 didn’t change the quantity selection (Success!! :D).

3. The Final Showdown

After collecting all the data on the above experiments in the form of heat maps, last transactions, browsing patterns, user funnels etc., we gathered all the components which were successful on one single page.

This experiment was introduced as an overlay just for testing purposes, and didn’t hinder the current booking flow.

Testing

We ran a small experiment to see if our solution works well. So we tested it on 5% audience.

1. Some people appreciated the preselection done for them, and overall enjoyed this simplified booking process.
2. Since we rolled out this idea in different stages, the data we had on users were based on each specific step and wasn’t necessarily holistic enough to provide the combination of all the steps for the user.

While the steps we took before we implemented 1 click booking was a success, 1 click booking in itself wasn’t necessarily adapted by as many users as we’d like.

Success Points

Our next steps would be to detect user trends and patterns. With the help of deep learning and machine learning we can improve our recommendations engine and work on visual interactions to make this flow intuitive.

Our individual components are currently live on the mobile app and have helped increase user conversions by 28%.

___
I hope you’ll enjoy reading this article, It’ll be great
if you hit the clap button.

_
Kiran Shivlingkar an Senior Product designer @We Are BookMyShow.

_

Peace out