Blog Post #1: Understanding Problem Space
- Interaction Design
- Apr 3, 2023
- 9 min read
Updated: Apr 9, 2023
April 2023 | Pho Vu, Nahye Kim, Jaeni Park, Jiwoo Jung, Jiwon Cha
📝 Preface: First off, how did we continue?
Second week into the project, we were required to work on another reflection paper with a shift to problems and possible solutions. To better divide our labor, we decided to split our workflow into two days. After briefly discussing in class and sorting out everyone's chedule for the week, we came to an agreement to meet on Saturday and Sunday at 11PM KST through Google Meet conferencing service.
Before the meeting, everyone was taken to a very super first draft that outlined a list of items to be covered in the next team progress presentation. There, each of us commented our name next to tasks that they thought they would perform best at their own discretion.
Besides, everyone was required to prepare a rough sketch about just anything that would be helpful for the service we’re developing.
Now, we are elated to share with you details into our productive weekend's 1st late night in which our team — five girls with different pursuits in creativity — spent time understanding problem spaces in South Korea's movie ticket purchasing mobile applications.
🚴🏻♀️ How was our process as a team?
We stressed the importance of user research, so it was not surprising that we spent the majority of this period perusing journals, research papers, articles, and many reports that could shed lights on the pros and cons of the current cinema ticket purchasing platforms in South Korea as well as users’ attitude towards them. We definitely needed more time to reflect and draw insights from the collected data, rather than pasting a bunch of information on a document.
We made time to catch up some task expectations!
We exchanged conversations where we mostly identified how we should interpret the requirements and carried out out reasearch. It turned out that we would have to do it over and over as because we explored more unknown parts in the discovery stage, our direction was consistently reshaped until we arrived at our current result
We made sketches for how we imagined the app would look like!
During class, one of the discussions surrounding sketching centered on how sketches helped us freely unleash our vision about a project. We had an abundance of sketches from our members, which we believed would make our prototyping process a tad bit easier.
We made time for affinity diagramming (on Miro!)
As we have come up with more than just a few problem spaces, we agreed among ourselves that it would be wise to sort through the similarities and differences among our inputs and organize these chunks of personal contributions into a unified system.
With to the help of Miro, we thought we couldn’t leave them in better hands! Below is a screenshot of what happened.
Beginning:
Result:
As you can see, on the left side of the braindump board, we actively made personal notes on various problems that current movie ticket purchasing apps were having, and on the right, we tried to group similar ideas together into different categories (and we came up with six, which was quite impressive!). Besides problems identitied across navigation, over-advertisement/promotions, customer services, location, movie exploration, and customization, we
If you're interested, pay our Miro Board a visit!
🔎 Defining our problem spaces
1. PHOTOS
As our destination is a movie ticket purchasing mobile application for users in South Korea, we’re showing you interface photos of: 1) existing mobile apps on South Korea market, and 2) some insightful international case studies of mobile apps. (Will be inserted soon!)
CGV ( 씨지브이)
CGV is a popular cinema chain in South Korea that offers its own mobile app for purchasing tickets, and is also the most popular cinema app used in South Korea.
The app allows users to browse movie listings, purchase tickets, and select seats. It also offers special promotions and discounts for members of its loyalty program.The app does not have a navigation bar and thus makes it relatively different to navigate throughout the app with different goals in mind. In order to create a photo ticket, an additional application must be downloaded.
Megabox (메가박스)
Megabox is another major cinema chain in South Korea that offers a mobile app for purchasing tickets.
Like CGV's app, it offers movie listings, ticket purchasing, and seat selection, as well as a loyalty program with special promotions and discounts. The overall layout of the application itself is quite similar to CGV’s app, except for the existence of a navigation bar. Creating and purchasing a photo ticket can also be accomplished without having to open a different app, and thus is relatively more convenient than CGV or Lotte Cinema.
Lotte Cinema (롯데시네마)
Lotte Cinema is another major cinema chain in South Korea that offers a mobile app for purchasing tickets.
Receiving the most positiche app offers movie listings, ticket purchasing, seat selection, and promotions for members of its loyalty program. When selecting “바로팝콘" or “이벤트" in the navigation bar, the interface makes it seem like a promotional pop-up is being opened, rather than opening the selected task bar.
Google Search Engine is the biggest international search platform.
If you type a certain movie title with some keywords like reservation, it provides screening timetables of the movie. If you click on one of the times listed, you will be taken to Interpark, a platform for booking cultural/arts tickets.
Naver (네이버)
Naver Search is the biggest search platform in Korea, and Korean users often see it as Korean version of Google search engine.
If you type a certain movie title with some keywords like reservation, it provides screening timetables of the movie. Clicking on one of the times listed will take you to that theater's website.
2. SKETCHES
Contributed by each member in the team, these sketches gave artistic and creative insights into the what the possible protyping will be like over the coming weeks. We didn't assign members with specific function page, we sorted these sketches
Landing page (Jaeni)
Location page (Nahye)
Large screen (web-based) and smartphone (mobile) version (Jiwoo)
Seating + Mapping + Homepage (Jiwon)
Homepage (Login + Interest) (Pho)
3. MEDIA RESEARCH
Our media research report focuses on the essential elements of an effective user experience and user interface design for an integrated movie ticketing platform. The report gathered insights from various sources to better understand the trends, challenges, and opportunities in the market. The report suggests that an effective UX/UI design should have a clean and simple design, easy navigation, personalized recommendations, and a secure payment gateway.
According to the collected data these elements below will make it easier for users to find and book movie tickets, leading to increased sales for cinemas. They are:
Clean and Simple Design: A problem that many UI designers face is to incorporate features and functions that do not distract users from their user experience of the products. An effective UI for an integrated movie ticketing platform should have a clean and simple design.
Easy Navigation: For UX designers, creating an environment that allows users to automatically make sense of all the presented features has been a great challenge. The UI should be easy to navigate, with clear menus and labels that guide users through the ticket booking process. An effective implementation of this feature will ensure that users can book tickets without feeling overwhelmed.
Personalized Recommendations: Oftentimes, these cinema ticket reservation apps “forget” to ask users what they are interested in watching. An optimized UX/UI experience for an integrated movie ticketing platform should provide personalized recommendations based on a user's past movie preferences. This feature will help users discover new movies they may enjoy.
Secure Payment Gateway: With the growth of technologies, high-tech crime rates also increase proportionally. As a result, fears of leaked personal information have taken over frequent users of online service. Bearing this key information in mind, the UI should have a secure payment gateway, ensuring that user payment information is safe and protected.
We can conclude that as the film industry evolves, the UX/UI of integrated ticketing platforms will remain a critical component in connecting moviegoers with their favorite films.
4. AI UTILIZATION
To make the best out of the currently trendy AI services, we have curated specific prompts that ask for a cinema ticket purchasing mobile application from prominent AI-based places like ChatGPT and Dall-E.
ChatGPT
Dall-E
Results demonstrated that, even though AI can be advanced with word-generated suggestions, its ability to provide us with a d
🌱 Team reflection
Migrating from project objectives to solution ideas is making a big leap to another whole level. It required concentration, effort, and especially TIME!! We are aware that everyone has a life and 4, 5 more classes to work hard for. This understanding permitted us to deeply empathize for all team members during this extremely trying time!
We are glad to establish a platform and an agreement that helps us communicate well inside and outside of class. Everyone’s open mindset has been the biggest plus point of the project so far. We are grateful for being able to make time to discuss our processing ideas and finalize them together as a TEAM.
For this blog, we want to stress that idea synthesis is really important. It takes everyone’s willingness to collaborate and high attention to details.
Of course, a summarized reflection is never enough to truly conclude everyone’s individual thought. So, we thought it would be insightful to let each member speak for themselves about their personal learnings!
Pho: In my impression, everything has been very fast-paced and demands lots of self-discipline from every individual. I was absolutely grateful for my members’ positive responses to our team meeting schedule and assignments. I was always taught that communication was key to all problems, and being able to discuss with my members from A to Z about the project gave me a solid learning experience in leadership and collaboration. What stuck out the most to me is the innovative direction that the project is gradually going in: to include foreigners and middle-aged adults (40s-60s) in the pool of target users! This is particularly fitting in the context of globalization. Having a mobile app catered to all moviegoers regardless of ages, genders, races, religions, languages, and cultures will take South Korea one step higher in its race for social innovation.
Nahye: According to the meeting, it seems that our problem definition can be divided into two parts: movie exploration and movie reservation. Based on this insight, we can plan research and design personas, user experience and interface.
Jiwoo: It was a challenging experience as it involves identifying pain points, analyzing user behavior, and coming up with creative design solutions that can improve the overall user experience. Throughout the research process, I was able to feel a sense of satisfaction from being able to identify and address common issues that users face. It can be particularly refreshing to see the impact of changes that have been made to the platform and how it can positively affect user engagement and satisfaction.
Jaeni: What I learned from this week’s meeting was seeing the challenges of using movie apps from international users' perspectives. Thanks to one of our members mentioning problems with the ticketing app lacking language support, I was able to approach finding problems in an unprecedented way. For example, I found out non-Korean users were struggling with limited options of payment methods. Visitors or newcomers, especially, don’t have a phone number to create a bank account in Korea so purchasing things online is very difficult. I did not notice that fundamental issue, payment method in this case, made these specific users be excluded from users of movie apps at all.
Jiwon: It was pretty challenging to look for new problems with the existing apps we have in the market, other than the little inconveniences that I had in mind as a frequent user. To see and use the application with an open mind and a new perspective was quite difficult, and to come up with a potentially possible solution that resolves those issues was also very new for me. I had to consider the new layout our solution would have to take when creating a new service, and because the new layout and interface would have to be aesthetically pleasing as well, figuring out a possible solution was very challenging.
🏆 Additional accomplishments
We also want to leave some space to talk about our extra efforts that we believed might come to handy in the next few weeks. Below are a few things that we have achieved outside the scope of required elements!
1. A new website: We finally migrated to a WIX platform. We think this is a great decision. Not that Google Site is not great, but for this project, we see that moving to WIX allows us to express our visions better!
2. ..And a mutually agreed prototyping platform: Between Figma and Adobe XD, we are leaning towards Figma to build our prototype for the mobile application. This is something to celebrate for, because later we don’t have to spend extra time mulling over which platform to go for.
Some sources to help understand our project better!
"10 Essential Features of a Movie Ticket Booking App" by Dimple Jain, Net Solutions, January 2021.
"The Power of Personalization in Online Ticket Sales" by Mark Kozlowski, Ticketing Today, July 2019.
"5 Essential Elements of a Great Movie Ticketing Experience" by David Monk, Vista Cinema, March 2021.
"Creating a User-Centered Design for Your Movie Ticketing Platform" by Ryan Ayers, Business2Community, March 2020.
"Why UI/UX Design is Critical for Your Movie Ticketing Platform" by Anisha Gupta, The Manifest, December 2020.
⏭️ What's next?
Visit Team Blog Post #3 to hear more about our plan!
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