Better Experience #18: Lost in the Cinemašæš¬
Improving way finding inside a cinema auditorium
Better Experience Design is a collection of arbitrary encounters with everyday things that have given us either delightful or stressful experience
1. What is it and what is the purpose?
Seat number is used to indicate your seat location. Normally, you choose the seat while purchasing the ticket.
2. Why/When did I use it?
If you want to watch a movie in a cinema, of course you picked the perfect spot to get the best view while you purchased the ticket, unlike the football stadium which you donāt have seating arrangements and you can choose the best spot while youāre there.
3. Was it a delightful or stressful experience? Why?
Have you ever came late to enter a cinema to watch a movie and had trouble to find your seat because the lights are already turned off? And felt awkward to turn on your phone flashlight because people will feel disturbed?
On the other hand, what if youāre the one whoās really excited to watch a movie that youāve been waiting for a long time. So you came early to the cinema, sat down at your seat with popcorn in your hand, went through the trouble of watching the ads, some movie trailers, then the lights slowly turning off, and finally, your movie starts!
5 minutes later, some people arrived late, trying to find their seat in the dark with their phone flash on and the glimpse of the lights dazzled you.
We almost never find it hard to pick our desired seat to watch a movie, but sometimes we found it hard to find the actual seat when weāre actually inside the theatre. The irony.
Which route is the best?
In some theatre, the gate keeper sometimes telling us which aisle should we take to reach our seat, but when in hurry, we tend to ignore it so we have to remember and end up in taking the wrong aisle.
Or we just donāt know the seating arrangement and thereās no clue at all.
Which one is number 10?
Iām not sure if there any standardisation for seating number placement. I found one that placed on the armrest, and itās a bit confusing to identify which seat is represented by the number because it placed in the middle of two chairs.
On the other theatre, sometimes we find the number on seat cushion, but it still a bit hard to carefully check the right one in the dark.
4. Can it be better?
Definitely, here are some ideas to improve the experience:
1. Print out the route
It might be helpful to print out the route on the ticket so it can guide you to your seat faster. You need suggestion no more from the keeper, just see it on your hand. But the cons is, it consume more paper for one single ticket.
Yup, you already know the best route to get to your seat, and what we need next?
2. Illuminated Signage
Letās say you already took the first aisle, unfortunately it already dark inside and you need an easy guidance to find the seat, so the illuminated signage seems perfect.
CGV have a good signage in their theatre. It has illuminated stairs, row and seat number information there.
The illuminated stairs is really helpful to put your step on, and what about the row and seat number info?
I try to make it clearer to show the row and seat number arrangement on the floor so you know which direction should you take to get your seat. The number range help you to estimate how many seat you should pass.
3. Illuminated Seat Number
Illuminating the seat number might be helpful in case youāre finding your seat in the dark while youāre coming late. The additional pain is coming when youāre checking the number but you have to step carefully at the same time because of people already sitting at their seat and you need to go through them.
To illuminate the seat can be implemented with different method to illuminating the aisle. I donāt think we can electrified the seat and put the little light on them, beside it needs a high effort (and cost), it also potentially disturb the other audience if it has bright luminance.
So I came up with an idea to put the seat number indicator printed on the head of the seat with reflective paint. So when in the dark, the number will lighten up when it illuminated by the reflective of cinema screen. Just like on this shirt below.
5. What do you think?
We think this might make a better experience of getting your seat in the dark theatre. What do you think?
Let us know in the comments if you have any idea about how to make it even better and letās discuss š
Thanks for reading! If you have any idea about what we should cover next, you can comment below / send us an email: hello@betterexperience.design!
