With 811 cinemas in the UK, booking tickets online has become very popular. The customer journey for cinema goers has developed over time to become consistently streamlined. The ease of booking tickets online and receiving a digital ticket through email, the cinema chains also have apps for smartphones were users can access all the functionality of the website. The issue is that the technologies incorporated into the digital aspects of the box office always seem to be a step behind other industries.
Comparing the design of cinema sites with that of retailers, you can see that retailers put focus is on the online experience for the customers. For example, hmv have a home page more akin to an entertainment news site and therefor provide greater value to the viewer, cinema sites just don’t do this. It’s interesting to compare cinema site to hmv because similarly they both have had intense competition form digital disruptors, such as Netflix.
A further evaluation of these cinema websites is needed, therefore I used the digital auditing tools; nibbler.silktide and website.grader. I took personal experience into account in choosing which sites to evaluate, this was so that I could align my personal opinion as a user with the numerical results of the auditing tools. The sites I chose are Cineworld, Showcase and Odeon, this incidentally is the order I would rate the user experience from best to worst.
However website.grader ranks them in a different order; showcase ranks first with 87/100, Odeon ranks second with 84/100 and Cineworld ranks last with 72/100. The main issue with all these sites is the performance aspect, with all the sites having pages that make a lot of HTTP requests, therefore it slows them down a lot.
Nibbler.silktide changed up the order again, showcase scored the highest again with 9/10, then it was Cineworld with a score of 8.4/10, and lastly Odeon with 8.1/10. Showcase’s largest problem seems to be with their mobile adaptation, personally I haven’t had any issue with Showcase on mobile but Odeon on the other hand I have had issues when using their site on a mobile platform and it is also reflected in their Silktide score. In Cineworld’s case their largest website floor is with the lack of descriptions for the internal links, this would negatively affect their ability to enhance their SEO.
Having now analysed the technicals of each website my original ranking has changed, I would now put Showcase at the top and Cineworld second mainly because it performs better and because I haven’t actually used Cineworld in a while. Odeon would still be last though.
Film Rabbit 