Project scope
The movie theater is something that whilst being a staple of American entertainment is also a place that has seen only small amount of innovation in the last decade. With a majority of the changes being toward the screen size and surround sound, whilst almost forgetting about the overall movie experience. The arrival and preparation are a major part of the theater experience, and are actually the most unique bits when comparing to watching the same movie in another location. Our project looked at making the customer’s overall theater experience as enjoyable as possible, which we found was something that required a revision behind the curtain.
Value Proposition
Regal Behind The Scenes is an inventory assistance platform service that enables Regal Floor Staff to work more efficiently and alert management to various theater problems unlike using walkie talkies and personal mobile devices.
Scope of All Data
Working with a Regal theater in Lynbrook, NY we were able to get data from floor staff, managers, bartenders, and movie-goers. Another integral part of our movie-goer data was gotten from going to various theaters across Long Island as well as gaining a better nationwide scope using social media platforms like Instagram and Reddit.
Overall we had a total of 201 survey participants, 10 interviews, 8 task analysis walkthroughs, and over 72 hours of observations.
201 Responses
Data Collected
The second set of surveys revealed that while movie-goers believe that concessions is the main problem at the movies, they also don’t believe it can be replaced. The managers main problems with concessions led back to disorganization of inventory behind the scenes. Floor staff also felt as though they couldn’t communicate with managers about the necessary shipments required to stock inventory.
36 Responses
10 Responses
79 Responses
36 Responses
79 Responses
“This soda taste weird”
-Movie goer
Design Fiction Characters
Design Fiction
Pablo arrives to the theater at 7 AM to unlock the doors for floor staff. He prints out the staff plan and then checks for callouts.
The shipment arrives an hour late, Brian knows it will be difficult to speed up the process using paper and pen.
Pablo finds out later that day the theater has been serving expired soda.
There is another late shipment, however this time the theater is ready, using RFID chips the geofence can detect any missing boxes immediately.
Pablo from his office is able to see all the day’s shipment data allowing Pablo too always know what’s happening in his theater.
Pablo sees one of the floor staff working stock has called out and goes to tell Brian.
Melissa arrives at the theater for her movie and orders herself a soda. Meanwhile Brian is still finishing up stock.
Furious, Pablo goes to yell at Brian for not replacing the expired soda with the new one from the shipment earlier that day
Using the theater new smartwatch, Brian is now able to successfully check and date shipments faster than ever before.
The tablet side of the system displays the data of shipments, floor staff arrival, and theater revenue.
Pablo finds Brian waiting for the late shipment to arrive at the theater. Brian knows this means he will be rushed.
Melissa gets to her seat and takes a sip of her soda, noticing it tastes weird. Melissa doesn’t get up as her movie is starting, but is displeased.
After the prior week’s debacle Pablo implements a new system that will help to quickly complete stock and keep track of inventory in the theater.
The smartwatch scans and records data, then sending it to Pablo who can see the full doc of information.
Melissa upon giving the theater another chance is pleased to find her soda correct, and overall enjoys her movie experience.
Interaction Models
Before creating my interaction models, my team and I created a software requirements doc detailing each specific asset appearing on each individual section which can be seen here. My Interaction Models detail the communication from the mobile and smartwatch alert and scan systems to the manager’s tablet, that stores and displays all of the combined data.
Sketching
For my sketches I identified the interactions different screens would take users, to give an idea of how one screen would become the next.
During the sketching process of the project, and gaining feedback from my main user being the floor staff employee, it became clear that many of the functions and features that the floor staff were looking for would begin to clutter within a smartwatch UI, and so I began the process of developing a mobile version of the smartwatch for employees.
UI comps
When creating the UI for the smartwatch, I purposely stayed away from blues and violets as these colors shorter wavelengths would be more straining to the eye when inside of the dark theaters. Further a dark-mode feature was added to the mobile to help with the bright white light that could be distracting. In keeping the UI simple it allowed for making a clear call to action within every screen, as well as causing there to be less of a chance for user error.
Information architecture
When developing my information architecture specs I focused on representing the individual interactions users will have on each screen. The yellow represents displayed assets on the screen, blue focuses on user dictated interactions, and the purple timed screen changes.
Manager’s Tablet
My project team member developed and created the manager user archetypes end of our solution. We worked together throughout each individual step of the project to ensure that the employee and manager devices flowed well together, and felt like they were part of the same service.
You can see her side of the solution here
Final Prototype
The mobile prototype was created using Adobe XD, and intertwines geofence, smartwatch, mobile, and tablet to create an information inventory and assessment service.
Pandemic’s impact
In late March 2020 theaters across the globe began shutting down due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Prior to this happening our research showed that movie theater’s needed to make some changes to their user experience in order to continue to thrive for in the future. Due to the pandemic the movie industry was forced to rapidly make changes it that would normally take a decade to put in place. Now with the future of movie theater’s in question it will be interesting to see how theater’s change up the movie-goer’s experience.