Helping to save Brazilian street movie theaters — Cinesala Case Study
São Paulo, Brazil, have almost the populations of Los Angeles and New York combined, and still, it has only 10 street movie theaters, because shopping centers are taking over the city.
After some research I found out that there’s a fading movement to keep street movie theaters alive, and I wanted to help that movement.
The movie theater’s battle royale
Cinesala is one of the last independent movie theaters of the city, having been built on top of Cine Fiametta, a historical cinema in the heart of the city.
Although they hold strong, offering a great variety of movies for a fair price, they cannot really compete with big franchises such as Cinemark or Cinepolis.
Not only the mental model for movie theaters has changed so much in the last decades that is unthinkable for most people that a movie theater can exist outside a shopping center, but most people are also not particularly satisfied with the digital experiences that most movie theaters offer.
The Problem
Photo by Cinesala.
It’s tricky to work around this subject, since the problem here was on the order of marketing positioning that CAN be solved by a design solution but can also be attacked through other means as well. Let’s explore this further.
The problem I tried to solve here mix three kinds of obstacles: (1) the confusing user flow taken to order a ticket and snacks, (2) the convenience proposed by competitors that often lead users to disconsider Cinesala as a viable option and (3) the digital real estate not being occupied in its full capacities.
Problem statement
As we’ll discuss later, the problem with Cinesala was not with the users that they already have, but for the ones they don’t. Put in a problem statement, it looks something like this:
“Amanda is a regular moviegoer that wants to explore the street movie theaters ecosystem but sees no incentives to do so.”
User journey map
- Receiving a Cinesala’s ad through Instagram.
- Clicking on their link in bio.
- Opening their website.
- Choosing a movie.
- Being redirected to a third-party application.
- Choosing the type of ticket and seat.
- Paying for the ticket.
- Receiving the ticket through email.
- Going to the movies.
Here we see some other problems with Cinesala’s strategy: (1) they’re mainly interacting with users through social media, where users get in touch with other brands; (2) there’s too many steps in order to buy a ticket and (3) not all physical features of the movie theater are represented in the digital experience.
The Solution
I really respect your time and appreciate that you stopped by to check my work, so in this section I’ll briefly talk about what I did in order to help solving the problem and then — if you like it — you may read about the process 😃.
I built an app with the primary objective of not only amplifying the digital real estate of the company, narrowing the competition for user’s time, and with the secondary objective of creating interesting features to the point where it becomes a much more interesting option than the competitors.
This project was developed between August/23 to October/23 and I was the UX Designer, UI Designer and UX Researcher for it.
What does it do?
It’s not really that hard to sell tickets, and to create a user flow for that, but to overcome the current mental model of users, I had to come up with ideas to make the experience more delightful when compared to the ‘standard’ option of going to shopping centers, and I had to do this through the creation of new features 👍.
What was I thinking? — My design artifacts
1/9 Who are we competing with? — Competitive audit
My first step was to conduct a competitive audit, in order to get a grasp on how good the experiences for buying tickets and snacks from our competitors were. The reason behind this is that I wanted to level the bottom of our experiences, so our users wouldn’t miss a thing about their ‘usual’ flow.
2/9 Accessibility — Competitive audit
In the same audit I discovered that Cinemark has a great accessibility menu developed by EqualWeb Brasil, so I took notice of that because I knew it was going to be important in the future.
3/9 What are the problems these users face? — Secondary research
After that, I wanted to understand what were the specific problems that Cinesala’s users were facing, so we could add another layer of quality to our experience, building not only on top of our competitors, but on top of current problems as well, so I conducted a quantitative research based upon the reviews made by clients.
What I discovered was that: 1) Cinesala offers an option to watch movies in a sofa, instead of a chair, but they’re very hard to get, because they sell fast, 2) their website was a little bit confusing in terms of showing off featured movies and prices, 3) the chairs aren’t numbered and 4) the snack buying experience is not optimal.
4/9 Who are we building for? — Primary research: user interviews and personas.
This was by far the most important part of this project. I wanted to know first-hand what made users go to Cinesala and not to other movie theaters, so I went to conduct user interviews. I developed 3 main questions (so I didn’t take too much time of the users) and interviewed 8 persons that had recently been at Cinesala.
At first it was very tricky, because, to my surprise, the majority of the users I interviewed were very happy with the experience in general. I almost gave up on the project, thinking that if the users were happy with the experience, there was nothing I needed to do as a UX Designer.
Maybe some advertising would increase the audience?!
But then I realized that there was something in common between them: the more times users went to Cinesala, the more they inclined into overlooking some ‘not so great’ parts of the experience — specially digitally. Some even gave up buying tickets digitally, giving preference for the ticket booth.
When I filtered the answers of the public that had been at Cinesala less than 2 times, I saw that they compared more between Cinesala and shopping center’s franchise’s experiences. This gave me the idea to pivot and start to work more on the ‘new clients’ side of the business.
After this I conducted a new round of research, but this time interviewing people that had interest in street movie theaters but had never been in one, in order to understand why that was. To maintain consistency, I developed three similar questions from the first round and interviewed 5 persons that followed a street movie theater in social media but had never been in one.
With results in hand, I realized that my main job was here: the vast majority stated that they wanted to try the experience of a street movie theater, but it was never convenient enough, or that they never found incentives to do so, and through online research, I discovered that this was a common theme for young people. So, I developed a Persona based on this.
5/9 What is the fastest way to get tickets to users? — User journey mapping and paper wireframing
Now that I had almost all the information I needed, it was time to start designing. My main concern in this moment was to create an easy to understand and quick flow to buy tickets. So here I started to develop my first User Flows, Information Architecture layouts and Wireframes.
New user journey map
So, after this work, the new user journey got to:
- Receiving a Cinesala notification via app OR ad through social media;
- Opening up the app;
- Choosing a movie;
- (Optional) Buy snacks for the movie session;
- Pay for the ticket;
- Going to the movies;
- Finding out that they generated points that could be converted into new movie tickets.
Which not only reduced in four steps the path to watching a movie, but added two delightful experiences that the users can’t have in any other movie theater in town.
6/9 How might we create incentives? — HMW, digital wireframing and lo-fi prototyping
After creating the first layer aiming for leveling up with the competitors and solving some problems, it was time to develop the features that would make more people experience Cinesala. Again, my main objective here was to make Cinesala irresistibly fascinating. In other words, give premium service for a fair price.
Three orders
Utilizing one of the strengths Cinesala has — its own restaurant — I included a way for the user to order snacks at three different opportunities: before the session, where the snack gets ready 1 hour before the movie starts, during the session, when the snack gets delivered right before the movie starts and after the movie session, where the snack its ready synced with the movie ending.
Sofas reservation
Solving one of the main complaints of the user’s reviews, I included a way to make the reservations for the sofas in the future, since Cinesala’s third-party ticket buying website usually only lets you buy for 3–7 days ahead max.
Cinepass
In order to create the perfect incentive for users to come back to Cinesala, I created a kind of fidelity program, where the user gets 1 dollar to every 3 dollar they spend. I stole this idea from game’s battle passes, famous in games like fortnite or rocket league.
Of course, the value can be fine-tuned in order to not cause too much ‘damage’ for the company.
Notifications
One of the most important traits about this project is the opportunity to gain digital real estate for Cinesala, and one of the best ways to do this is through Notifications that warns users about new movies, last sofas available and countdown to their next sessions. The hard part was to balance it in a way that it’s not a deceptive pattern for the users, and does not generate FOMO.
7/9 What do users think about them? — Usability test
After finishing the lofi prototype, it was time to test it. So, I created 3 tasks in order to understand how good the designed user flow was and 3 separate questions to find out how valuable the new features were for the users, and how likely it was for them to download the app in the future.
8/9 Solving the new problems. — Mockups and hi-fi prototype
The results of the usability test were that although the users found the app easy to use, the task where I asked them to buy snacks without buying a movie ticket was harder to execute, because they didn’t know what “Barouche” (the name of Cinesala’s restaurant) in the nav bar meant.
So, after correcting this, I went into creating the mockups that would become the hi-fi prototype, in order to get a feeling of how much I could explore the UI.
9/9 What do users think about the new version?
After running the test with the same users, gladly, they got surprised with how good looking the app turned out to be, and the metrics went up as well, the main one being the chances of the users to download and keep the app in their phones going up by 10%.
Fun fact
All the items in Cinepass have movie references as their descriptions. And I mean searching for over 30 movie lines that contained the name of the item. GREAT SUCCESS! 👍😄👍
Obstacles
Slightly dated brand guidelines
Apart from the mistake in strategy that almost caused me to give up on the project, the main obstacle faced was the slightly dated brand guidelines, that somewhat capped my UI possibilities. Bebas Neue and Droid Sans are not the greatest typefaces when it comes to UI Design in 2023.
What were the results?
Being an exploratory project, there is no way of measuring real impact, but I reckon that increase of sales and returning customers were going to be the most important metrics to track, because they’d reveal the growing of the company and also the lifetime value of users in general.
My projections
New unique selling proposition — With these designs, Cinesala got to be the only one on the market to have this specific set of skills. (😉)
Dropouts’ reduction — Reducing the number of steps needed to get a movie ticket may improve the number of dropouts.
Digital real estate — Only two other franchises have working apps in Brazil, this means that we can dispute in user’s home screens, and not social media.
Augmented lifetime value — One of the new features addresses how to make users return, in order to increase their lifetime value.
How did it end?
The reasoning behind a finished beta version
Of course, we could very well spend more time creating more features, like auto buying tickets, or goal oriented Cinepass points, but I guess we’re at a stage where the main features to make this a valid app is already done, so we can consider it a Beta version.
The future
In my opinion, the best approach for the future — giving the fact that this app would cause a major impact in the business operations — would be to analyze the metrics that would derive from launching, understanding the impacts of it for existing and potential customers, and researching what would be the new priorities for the users, and developing based on that.
Shoutouts
People that helped me in research, both creating reviews or answering my questions — or, as I said, my research team: Stephani Santoro, Ana (Dicas de SP), Amanda Lisboa, Luana Justtino, Pedro Oliveira, Jennifer Brito, Alexandre Siqueira, Larissa Hupalo, Maria Eduarda Garcia and Aline Sampaio. You made my work possible.
And to my teachers: Daniel Furtado, Rodrigo Lemes and Andrei Gurgel, that create content so we don’t give up.
Final disclaimer
This is a study case of USER EXPERIENCE POSSIBILITIES and does not reflect the business’ desires or work in progress.
