Problem: BookMyShow and its cinema partners used an age old system to communicate, impeding revenue growth
BookMyShow originally communicated with all its cinema partners through SMS. They exchanged vital information like upcoming show timings, number of tickets sold, seating details and revenue numbers through this medium. Data like show timings and seating details in particular, were then manually fed into the system to render on the consumer-facing app, with a resultant lag time. This was an inefficient, people-heavy and time consuming process, that directly impacted BookMyShow's business and impeded potential revenue.
Business opportunity: Increasing revenue for BookMyShow and cinema partners
Our goal was to build an efficient form of communication between BookMyShow and its cinema partners that not only solved for communication issues, but opened avenues to expand business growth for both stakeholders.
For BookMyShow, this meant using technology's realtime-ability to negate the time it took to manually upload showtime data, thereby decreasing the booking cut-off-time, accepting last hour bookings and increasing revenue. For cinema partners, it had the potential to enable better decision making by making relevant data accessible and consumable.
Target users: cinema owners, managers and booking staff
Our users had limited exposure to technology and weren’t familiar with complex information architectures or interaction patterns. The guiding design principles therefore, prioritised simplicity over flexibility and information over intuitiveness.
Product goal: ship an MVP within 2 months, built across 3 distinct phases
Our aim was to release an MVP within 2 months to present our product vision through a working product to select cinema partners. We also wanted to gather data for BookMyShow on whether a technological solution would aid its cinema partners and BookMyShow in return.
The design process was divided into 3 phases, each running for 2 weeks (sprint). The same team ran through all sprints: a PM, researcher and designer (me), creating a prototype and user testing with potential customers, before handing it to engineers to develop.
Phase 01: track tickets sold, visually
Problem: Cinema liasons are sent text messages with the seat numbers for seats booked on BookMyShow. This is tedious, complicated and confusing to keep track of.
Solution: Create a quick and simple visual tool to track seats sold for each show that updates in real time.
When we ran usability tests on the first approach, we found that;
Phase 02: create showtime schedules easily
Problem: New showtimes are sent to BookMyShow via email/ text manually, which means tracking changes leads to confusion and inefficiency, beyond the expense BookMyShow endures for a people-centric process.
Solution: Enable cinema managers to create schedules and send to BookMyShow via the app.
Cinema managers need to send showtime details for all movies for at least a week at a time to BookMyShow’s database, which then renders across the consumer app.When designing the above experience, we were mindful of and maintained the mental models and steps our users followed already. What does that mean?
We first explored a date-wise scheduling of events (details below). However, through research we discovered that:
Phase 03: enable data driven decision making
Problem: Cinemas had no way of tracking success of shows and movies, leading to a loss of potential revenue due to uninformed planning of shows.
Solution: Provide an interface for data analytics to track show and movie related data like revenue and tickets sold.
A cinema manager could be in charge of one cinema (especially in the case of single screen theatres) or multiple cinemas under the same parent company (eg. PVR). According to statistics, the most common scenario is the former- manager is only responsible for 1 cinema. This is why we took the decision for a single cinema to be the default view. In cases where a manager is incharge of more cinemas, the default view is a cumulation of all cinemas they are in charge of. This provides them with a wholistic picture of sales and other vital data (seen above).
Managers responsible for more than one cinema also have the option to filter to individual cinemas or compare statistics between 2 or more cinemas. This enables them to visualise comparative data on sales performance, occupancy metrics, and movie performance across locations. Our hypothesis was that providing flexibility to compare data would enhance a manager's ability to make better business decisions.
Personal growth
Beyond the business impact of this product for BookMyShow, being given the sole responsibility of designing a 0-1 one product for the new internet user, my learnings grew: