Paytm Insider is an app that sells tickets to concerts and sporting events. We are adding movie tickets to our offering. Because this is a mature and saturated market with big existing apps, it is important to meet basic user expectations before adding features for delight.
Paytm Insider is a entertainment ticketing app for concerts, sports travel, and more. We were moving into a new space: movies. Movies are a mature space for online ticketing, so there was a large, existing set of user expectations to meet. We wanted to meet and improve people’s base expectations for a ticket buying experience, and find a key new feature that would differentiate us from the competition.
Being a new marquee feature, this involved a large cross-functional team from business relationships, product roadmaps and backend teams, to product design and app development on iOS and Android.
Although satisfaction can be a single scale from frustration to delight, no amount of delightful features can make up for disappointing basic user needs. Expectations are boring but you can fail at them, and the best case is often a lukewarm “it works”. That’s the minimum bar you have to hit before delight is a possibility.
With a new product, our primary goal was to meet the expectations current users had of a movie ticket booking experience. Step one was to learn how people bought tickets.
Our parent company had already been selling movie tickets that gave us a quantitative insight into customer buying trends. Key takeaways were:
With this as a starting point, we conducted user interviews to discover what factors influenced a decision and the order in which those factors mattered.
Counter to our expectation that the movie was a movie goer’s first decision, more people had a day in mind (often weekends), and then looked at what movies were running on that day. So we introduced a top-level date selector reducing the disappointment of selecting a movie and finding it was sold out, or wasn’t even out yet!
We also found people often compared multiple theatres for showtimes and were able to pull that information forward to our list screen. You can then, pick a date, find a movie and compare theatre showtimes, all on one powerful screen. In some cases, a single click could take you straight to seat selection.
Once we had a functioning buy flow, we broke down the user journey to find touchpoints that we could improve for the movie experience. Ideal candidates would be areas that we had information for that users were solving a different way.
Two areas we chose were trailers and confirmations with friends. Both were areas that required no additional content creation from us, were spaces we had value to add, and would allow the Paytm Insider app to be a stronger part of the user’s journey.
YouTube trailers were most often people’s first touchpoint with a film. However they are disconnected from the ticket buying experience. To most ticket apps, trailers were an end-point or an extra feature, not core to discovery. If people were discovering movies this way, we wondered if it could be a way people shopped for tickets.
Trailer mode let’s you watch a stream of trailers of both current and upcoming releases. You can swipe over to the next trailer, jump straight into the buying flow, or elect to be notified when tickets are on sale. Trailers across the app launch into trailer mode, so it’s a core feature, and we even have a dedicated option for only upcoming releases to get you hyped!
During seat selection, especially with larger groups, people often conferred through WhatsApp groups on the best seats, and confirmed dates and times. The easiest way to do this was a simple screenshot of the app. However, often that meant missing part of the seatmap or not having some key details visible.
So we created a seat map share button. It generates a map of the entire theatre, with the selected seats highlighted and all movie details summarised. All ready to be shared anywhere.
Very cool first-world problem solving by @insiderdotin in their ticket booking product!
— Shiladitya (@shiladitya) June 7, 2019
One click screenshot sharing to check which seats you want to book for your group 😄 / cool stuff @sshreyas pic.twitter.com/Iy0SFWEQHl