In order for me to build a product to solve the user's problem, I first needed to understand the user. With the wide target audience in mind, I conducted a handful of user interviews with varying age, backgrounds, and experience at movie theatres. I started by getting to know them better and making them feel more comfortable before finding out in-depth experiences purchasing tickets online and at movie theatres.
There were three common pain points that stuck out to me:
• Count down timers on apps and websites made users feel on edge
• Purchasing tickets as a group has complications when trying to decide on a date/time, and sharing tickets afterward
• Users often want to go backwards in the flow but worry about losing progress
With all the data collected from the interviews, I created a few personas to represent the goals and characteristics of the end users.
I began the design phase by sketching out some wireframes of what the app would look like. I made multiple iterations of the app's home screen and moved through the user flow.
From the paper wireframes, I created digital low fidelity wireframes and a prototype. The layout highlighted each movie and make extra information available without overwhelming the user. I addressed key pain points that came up in research, sharing movie details and available showtimes, and making sure to add a 'change date/time' option mid flow.
Using the lofi prototype, I ran two rounds of usability studies with 6 users in order to obtain some real-time feedback on what improvements I could make to the user experience of this design.
Working on this project taught me how critical the define and research phases are in UX design. It was very important for me to ignore my personal biases and assumptions, especially as I could see myself being part of the target audience I'm designing for. Some of my early designs seemed intuitive to me, but were unclear for users to understand. The usability studies helped me see which of those designs had the best user experience, which paved the way towards my high fidelity designs. The more time I spent on research and experimenting with early designs meant less time spent having to make major changes later on.
