Solar Cinema Mobile App Design

Overview

Solar Cinema is a theater mainly located in the west of the United States. Solar Cinema intends to build a communicating and booking mobile platform, where audiences can reserve movies, communicate, and browse related news.

My role:

UX designer

UX researcher

Visual designer

Duration: December 2021 to January 2022

Understanding Our Users

Mia (anonym) is a bridge engineer with 3 children, she expects to pre-order foods and drinks because it is inconvenient to take care of children while waiting in line at food court.

 
 

Lee (anonym) is a graduate student, he likes to see more details of movie information, such as crest and crew; he also expects to communicate with other audiences.

Challenges

  • App Functions

    Do not have a favorite list/page, users couldn’t save movies to watch later.

  • Communications

    Couldn’t communicate with other audiences, or see their reviews of the movie for reference.

  • Order Options

    Don’t have the option of pre-order foods and drinks while booking the tickets.

  • Accessibility

    Lack of information on movies, such as posters, cast, and crew.

Start of The Design

Paper Wireframes

The drafts of each screen contain the elements expected by users.

Low-Fidelity Prototype

The low-fidelity prototype includes the user flows of viewing movie information, saving movies to the favorite page, reserving movies, and path to the other pages.

Usability Study Findings

The participants were recruited online, they were asked to finish a series of tasks, for example, “Reserve a movie from the favorite list, and add a large popcorn and soda to the order” and so forth. The affinity diagram and insights were created after analyzing the data, the findings were used to develop high-fidelity prototypes and look for aspects that need to improve for mockups.

Affinity Diagram

  • Ordring Process

    Users had difficulties during the process of ordering foods and drinks. Participants reported a hard time finding where to order popcorns and soda.

  • Interaction

    Users did not see any reaction after clicking the heart icon, they were not sure whether they saved the movie to their favorite successfully.

  • Navigations

    Users took some time to finish the tasks like saving a movie to their favorite list and checkout, which could be resulted in the blur indication of icons and bottoms.

 

Refining The Design

Mockups

Compared to the wireframe, the mockups improved the outline of the checkout page, the interaction of the heart icons, and extended the review section on the movie info page. Additionally, the bottoms and navigations were indicated more directly.

High-Fidelity Prototype

The high-fidelity prototype presented flows of opening a movie information page, saving movies to the favorite page, reserving a movie, and pre-ordering foods and drinks.

Future Steps

Further usability studies will be conducted in the future to ensure the app meet users’ expectation, the pain points are addressed, and the user flows are smooth.

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