Online Movie Ticket Sites Usability Fail

I’m what you might call a movie buff. During less busy times in my life I used to watch almost any movie I could get my hands on in search for hidden gems. I took filmmaking in high school, religiously attended film festivals, was a fixture in indie movie theaters and video stores, as well as an early Netflix subscriber. Those days are gone. Nowadays I need to think twice before I commit to a two-hour viewing session. So when things start quieting down on holiday season, for me it’s time to catch up on my movies.

The past couple of weeks served as a reminder to me why online movie showtimes and ticketing could improve by a mile.
I live in the highly populated border between midtown and the Upper East Side in Manhattan. This means that I’m fortunate enough to have four multi-screen theaters within just a few blocks . And within only a couple of subway stops I have at least four more, not to mention a variety of art house theaters. Quickly and easily finding the right movies, theaters, and showtimes online however can be a real pain.

The biggest (but not only) problem is that the two large ticket sites, Fandango and MovieTickets.com serve different theaters.
So when I punch in my zipcode in either site, I’ll only get a partial list of the options in my area. Both sites will ultimately show all theaters, but only after they’ve exhausted even their most remote properties.  So rather then getting a full list of theaters in my neighborhood sorted by distance, I’ll first get every ticketable theater in Central NJ or Long Island before the non-ticketable one down the block. While I can understand the sites’ desire to push their own ‘merchandise’ first, this is absolutely ridiculous: there is no way I will travel 15 miles, and switch 3 trains or buses to watch a movie I can catch in my own nabe. If one of these sites however gave me a full list of options, even those they don’t ticket, it will substantially improve my user experience and create more stickiness and loyalty, so that their site will always be the first I visit (kind of like Progressive Insurance showing the rates of their competitors). One way I hacked past this problem is by bookmarking my favorite theaters on both sites, and just looking at my custom list every time. However, this doesn’t work when I happen to be in neighborhoods I don’t know well, so it’s back to square one then.

In general usability, both sites, as well as the other aggregators linking to them,  are lacking. We’ll start with the better one. Fandango’s user experience is definitely better than MovieTickets.com. When you search by zip code on Fandango, you get a list of theaters with their street address and all the movies they are playing, as well as showtimes — right on the first page. This means I can easily skim the page to see which theater plays the movies I’m interested in and at what times, and figure out if the theater is close enough. This is in contrast to MovieTickets.com that just gives you a list of theater names. Just names. No address, no movies shown, no showtimes. To see this info, you need to click again, and then click back if you didn’t find what you wanted. Highly frustrating. Then if we go to the iPhone sites of either it’s even worse: no option to log in and see your faves, Fandango’s convenient full display is gone to be replaced with a limited selection of movies and again a list of just theater names, and in movietickets, well, like on the main site, it takes several taps to do what one tap could suffice for.

MovieTickets.com - just a list of theaters with no useful info. Bad user experience.

Some aggregators do a decent job. For example Google Movies shows the full selection sorted by distance, will all the info you need right in front of you. However, they seem to only allow ticket purchases only with a limited number of Fandango theaters rather than all the full fandango selection (which is pretty odd). AOL misses the mark both on selection and distance, Yahoo Movies, which is affiliated with MovieTickets.com, shows a limited list though with a convenient display. Flixter offers a comprehensive list, as does their Movies iPhone app, tho the app again requires lots of taps to get the info you need.

Fandangos search results make a lot more sense with movie listings, theater adresses, and more, but still incomplete results, and very un-web2.0

Finally, all sites could use some web2.0-nizing. For example, show movie synopsis on-hover a-la Netflix, as well as show map on hover or click using light-box rather than navigating away from the page. And MovieTickets.com should really incorporate flash video trailers! It’s the little things that go a long way in user satisfaction.

Google Movies results are convenient and relevant, tho prchase options are very limited