Complementing journeys & operations with a new cinema info screen ui

Reel Cinema is a brand of Emaar and one of the leading entertainment destinations in Dubai, United Arab Emirates with its flagship cinema being located in Dubai Mall that has just under a 100 million visitors every year.

At the point when Emaar Entertainment Group project manager reached out to us to support with the new interface, the project has undergone through multiple iterations.

One of the first questions we have asked was about the future space and set up. We needed to understand how the journeys would be layed out to decide on where to start by ensuring that all touchpoints work in unison.

We have reviewed the new process, rapidly designed a few journeys to understand potential pain points of future visitors and here is what we found: fully digitised operations, henceforth potential queues during peak timings in front of the digital kiosks as people would need to buy both tickets and order food, large open space required the content to be visible by bystanders far from the screen, 4 journeys required two different approaches to displaying & prioritizing the content.

Benchmarking
To solve all that, we have benchmarked best of the best outside of the industry: airports for schedules & sequential timings, Netflix for genres & recently added content, Amazon for presenting the context of the show, etc.

Utilization of space
We have also used Fibonacci's Golden Ratio to prioritize the content on the screen, military format for timings to squeeze more content that took visibly less space and to prioritize hours vs. minutes.

Reducing queueing anxiety
How often. have you caught yourself thinking about the person in front of you at the ATM about the amount of time he/she takes to transact?

The same happens at the digital kiosks when during peak hours people queue and often worry about that the tickets will run out. That creates an anxiety. And even if one didn't bother worrying while waiting, a disappointment might still be waiting behind the corner as a 5-10 min wait brought no reward.

To avoid this, we have implemented a traffic-light system that would show if the show was fast selling or was already sold out. This way people can avoid wasting time in the queue, or make up their mind about the new show while waiting rather than trying to make a decision in front of the kiosk and aggravating the crowd behind.