I’m not a movie buff. I can’t hold a decent conversation on directors or movie stars (except Meryl Streep – who, is obviously amazing) BUT I’m addicted to going to the movies. And that makes me one of your ideal customers.
But Hoyts, your website is a truly awful mess. I really, really hate using it. And because of that, I don’t think I see as many movies as I otherwise would. If you’re frustrating me, you’ll be frustrating other people too, and because of that your website is limiting your revenue potential. As a friend I’ve got some tips that I think might help…
1. Tone down on the advertising
Here’s a diagram of what your website looks like in a pretty typical browser window. Adverting is taking up 42% of screen space. Advertising can still be part of your web strategy and revenue, but remember, advertising isn’t your core business. Leisure is.
2. Get smart with defaults
When I visit your website, most of the time it’s because I want to see session times. But from the homepage I’ve got to specifically say I want to see session times, and then choose a cinema before I’m even close. And every time I click the page is reloading and I’m having to scroll past that huge banner ad at the top. If I wasn’t so trustful I’d almost think you’d designed the website to maximise advertising impressions instead of supporting your customers.
So, instead of making me ask to see session times, just assume that I do. And instead of asking me what cinema I want to see showtimes for, don’t make me ask, just show me relevant cinemas based on my location via an IP address lookup.
3. Match my mental model
At the moment I have to select a movie, and then I’m displayed show times for the next 7 days. But I want to see a movie tonight, and to see what options I have available, I have to click on each movie to check to see if it’s playing today. Right now, the Regent on Worscester Street is showing 42 movies. That’s a lot of clicks just to get an idea about what’s showing today. Makes me think you’re ingeniously trying to increase page views…
My suggestion is to make flip that model upside down and let people select a single day and show session times for movies showing on that day. You can even make a smart default and show movies for today by default.
4. Speed it up
A typical movie results page makes 95 HTTP requests, and makes downloads of over half a megabyte. Seriously, for a webpage, that’s huge. You need to take a look at your templates and remove unnecessary images, combine files where possible to decrease latency and compress text files using HTTP compression.
5. Give me more
Some people will know exactly what movie they want to see, others might be just wanting to kill some time and choose what’s on. Parents might be looking for a PG movie to take their kids, someone else might be looking for a movie they can see before their next lecture starts (or before the last bus leaves). At the moment you make me work to find what I’m looking for. Changing the information structure to match my mental model will help to start, but also give me a summary of what the movie is about and a quick jump into the trailer because I’m not a walking encyclopedia of movie names!
Redesign
Here’s a side-by-side view of the current website design, and a quick schematic diagram showing an alternate design:
At a glance, there are some major changes to the basic layout of the page.
Here’s what’s happened:
- The advertising space has been minimised but because there is more room on the rest of the page, potentially the entire header could become a fixed element that is displayed regardless of scrolling on the page. This would ensure that the advertiser would have more exposure, even if page views decrease.
- Local cinemas are aggregated into regional groups rather than individually, the most relevant group is displayed by default, and it’s assumed that people are looking for movies currently showing today which allows information to be shown immediately on the homepage without any clicks at all!
- Each movie row shows a lot of extra detail. Along with the movie title, a short description and image is shown to give some context about the movie. The image also acts as a control to play a trailer for the movie. A star rating and movie rating adds another level of information about each movie.
- For each session, as well as showing the start time, the end time is also displayed, and the length of the movie is visually demonstrated. Sold out sessions can be given visibility which promotes urgency for people to reserve seats in a session time that is not sold out – a benefit to both the customer and to Hoyts.
These are only some quick changes that haven’t taken a lot of serious thought, but I think it’s a big improvement. Just imagine how great the Hoyts website could be if some considered thought went into understanding their customers and the things they want to do on the Hoyts website?
What do you think? Do you prefer the current design, or the ideas demonstrated in this schematic design – or do you like bits of both? Let me know in the comments below!
Props
See Magic Ink by Bret Victor (http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/) which explores ideas of context sensitive graphics, including an example of a cinema session time redesign.
I remember vividly when I last visited the Hoyts website. It was when they broke the site so much the cinema session times site I go to got broken.
Fortunately, the breakage didn’t last too long and I can live in ignorance of whatever horrors Hoyts’ web team came up with this time.
Join me: http://noremote.co.nz/index.cgi?city=ch
I don’t think you’ll ever go back.
Added bonus: titles link to IMDB movie pages instead of whatever marketing fluff the distributors put up.
–Phil.
@Phil thanks for your comment and double thanks for the link to http://noremote.co.nz – that’s the website that I’ve been wanting to make myself for a while, so glad that someone else has done it!
The IMBD links are a great touch – I don’t think I ever see a movie before having a quick read on IMDB or Wikipedia.
Only one question remains… why didn’t I know about this before?! o_O
Wow, that blob of advertising on top really threw me off. I was expecting that white area to be part of the actual website.
totally agree. good one!
@Rand – you’re lucky – you’ve got http://www.google.com/movies to help you find movies!
@armamd thanks :)
[...] For more about Hoyts, check out Mathew Sanders post: Dear Hoyts: here’s 5 tips on showing movie times on your website [...]
Only slightly related because it’s to do with the movies, but still interesting – a link from @KathySierra that tells you movie by movie what happens at common times into movies that people need to pee, and what happens in the 3 mins that they run to the bathroom and back:
http://runpee.com
[...] Dear Hoyts: here’s 5 tips on showing movie times on your website – Seems movie chain owners are getting lots of free advice about how to improve their websites… Here Mathew Sanders puts forward some ideas for Hoyts. I suspect the teams working on these sites are making the same suggestions, but somehow management is missing the point… [...]
Sky city’s movie site is pretty dire too – and ridiculously slow.
I see that the cinemas have opened up ticketing to the bookmyshow.co.nz site, which is considerably faster & better designed. So much so I’m tempted to use it despite the $1 per ticket booking fee.
Thanks Steve for that link – I’d not seen the bookmyshow.co.nz site before!
It’s interesting that the cinemas have opened up bookings through a third party. I guess it’s another booking channel, but at the same time it’s opening themselves to competitors, and they loose control of other marketing opportunities and other benefits that they would by selling direct.
Personally, I don’t pre-book unless it’s for a limited screening/film festival movie. So all I’m looking for is an easy way to find what movies I could see tonight/this weekend – and at the moment noremote.co.nz is still best for allowing me to easily see what’s showing.
Bookmyshow does show session times – but only for one cinema at a time, and I still have to make a few selections to actually get to that information e.g. http://tr.im/rECz — it would be great if those details were easier to reach from the homepage.
Matthew
You can actually get Showtimes for all Movies using the “Insta Search” feature on BookMyShow. Just pick the region you want in top right of home page and it will show you all showtimes for all movies in that region – and it defaults to “today” as you have suggested in other posts
With regard to “another booking channel” these types of sites are common in other countries – see http://www.fandango.com. The key advantage is it is cross circuit. So in Auckland you can see showtimes for Berkeley, Rialto, SkyCity, Bridgeway.
Hi Murray, thanks for pointing that out.
As I was browsing the site I was looking for times, and on that page I didn’t even notice the times – it happens to be that the first two movies for Auckland Central region at the moment only have one session time for today so it’s not immediately clear that this is a page displaying session times.
I think the cinema session times page is much clearer – and I wonder why the format used here can’t also be used for the regional display.
As for aggregators like Fandango.com (and bookmyshow.co.nz) there is no denying the customer value that comes from having all that information localised in one place – I completely agree that it’s a fantastic proposition, but from a business sense I would have thought that when possible, direct sales would be preferred. And going up the chain of companies I see bookmyshow.co.nz is in the extended SKYCITY Cinemas family so maybe it’s not such an indirect channel after all – any maybe why Hoyts cinemas aren’t included in the regional results.
I hate the hoyts website, love going to the movies. I have passed up going ot see a movie as it was too hard ot track down the session times. I agree, please simplify your website!!! Tricia
I like the site but not the ads. I dont understand why (if you use logic) you cant find tickets etc. on this site. It is pretty straight forward. They cant spoon feed everyone that doesnt understand how to use a computer. I’m sure the percentage of people who cant get tickets is minimal compared to the amount that do.