Making Movies painful

Hoyts is one of the major cinema chains in Australia & New Zealand.  I've been sitting in their cinemas since I was a kid and intermissions still existed.  They form a huge part of some of my earliest cinema-going memories and helped fuel my ever growing passion for movies.

But I have a big problem with their website.

I dread every time I need to check a session time for one of their cinemas.  The navigation is painful, the site is completely cluttered, it doesn't use any type of smarts or autodetect, it ignores my profile information and the mobile site is next to impossible to find.  Yes, I'm going on a bit but let me qualify this a little more.

Firstly,lets talk about browser detection.  The design of the main site is the most mobile un-friendly site I've visited for a long time.  Surprising for a site that you'd think would have a lot of mobile traffic with people checking session times for a quick last minute decision to go see a movie.  There is a mobile site but good luck finding it.  Which brings me to my point - why do I have to go find the mobile site myself?  Why doesn't the site direct me to it automatically?  Who knows...

Next there's the fact that we're urged to 'buy tickets' wherever you look.  Now I know that selling tickets is almost the cinemas's number one reason for being (ripping you blind at the candy bar is their primary one), but do we need to have it shoved down our throats everywhere?  How about a softer sell?  How about 'session times' leading into a purchase funnel?

Correct me if I'm jumping to wild conclusions but I'm suspecting that most people that visit a cinema's website is to see what's on, when it's showing at their chosen location and finally, to buy tickets.  In that order.

So why flip the whole thing around?  Why make it hard for me to get to what I want?  I know where my local cinema is, I know what I want to see and I prefer to buy my tickets in person.  Just tell me when it's on please.  The irony is that the links to Bing in both the nav section and in the big ad sitting on the site both give you exactly what you want with quick well formed search string.  Session times in an easy to read format for my local cinema - heaven forbid.

I really hate it when I register on a site but every time I go there, I have to introduce myself all over again.  It's like a visit to old relative with alzheimers' - It's stuck in the past, technologically retarded and with no idea about who you are or why you're there.

To the point, how many people visit the site undecided about where they want to watch the movie?  I mean there's not exactly a cinema on every street corner.  You go to the Hoyts website pretty much knowing where your local screens are.

But the site has no idea.  And why should it really?  Well for a few reasons actually.  Firstly, it should know where I am and recommend my closest venue.  Secondly, if I've bought online before, this should be even easier for them to suggest.  Lastly, and more annoyingly, because I'm a Movie Club member!  They not only know where I live, but which cinemas I go to and what I see.  They even ask me for my preferred cinema!

Like sitting near a loud talker.  Like a mobile going off.  Like the frozen Coke machine being out of order.  Like not being able to open the choc-top pack (and having to deal with there being no banana flavour as advertised). ... You've failed me Hoyts.  :(

Inbox roundup: Rags to riches

Miss Money Penny is a great Australian online small business success story. Their model is pretty simple, the site is designed to help people sell their unwanted designer clothing and accessories.

In the style of ebay, upload your product photos, the description & price and when it sells, the site gets a cut.

Putting aside the issues that I have with the usability and user interface of the site itself, I'm going to look at their email communication for now.  It's ripe for some tweaking.

First up, the subscription process is an interesting one.  While the form is pretty standard and concise, the resulting email is not a subscription confirmation or a welcome at all - rather it's an inquiry confirmation and seems to be a product of a questionable CRM.  Secondly, it's from Vanessa D, rather than MMP.  Lastly, this email states

Campaign Newsletter Subscriptions
[Miss Money Penny Newsletter] - requires you to verify your subscription.

There's no link here so I don't know what the purpose of that copy is at all.

So, about the email itself, I think there's a lot of things that can be improved.  Let's start at the top, the subject line (Just In Designer Resale Finds) is missing a hyphen or a colon or something after Just In.  Is re-sale hyphenated?

There seems to be a bit of a waste of space above the header with a few lines of blank white before the read online and unsub text.  Trimming this down would help get more content above the fold considering that the header is so big.

Next up is the centered text. What's up with that?  There's a reason why GeoCities doesn't exist anymore and this is one major one.  If this text blinked and the background was a repeating pattern, I could swear I was back in the early 90's!

Grammatically, this is a little epileptic, with the random use of capitalisation and the repetition in the "Click here for our Fave's our Fave's".

To improve the aesthetics and overall effectiveness of this email, I would put this feature item first and re-write the copy to be a short, personalised intro.  I'd crop this photo so as no to suck up so much real estate. Then I'd stick the first four images at the top of the email below this feature.  I think that layout makes more logical sense to the reader and flows nicer.

As for the last third of the layout, I get the idea of having a quirky image to sign off with but I think this section can be improved a little.  The whole site is about buying and selling desirable designer brands.  Those brands mentioned in the copy below the photo should be much more prominent and hyperlinked to the site.  It's a great CTA, use it!

I think there's a great opportunity for testing and optimisation of this email.  Guaranteed that whatever clickthrough stats are being achieved now could be improved with a bit 'designer alteration'.