AMC Theatres is a mobile app that supports the chain of AMC movie theatres across the United States. It allows people to purchase movie tickets, view movie information, manage their AMC Stubs membership, and more. This critique will specifically address the UI of their home and movie screens and the task of selecting a seat.
Home screen
Opening the app places you at the “See a movie” screen. The tabs near the top of the page (Figure 1) signifies that you are on the “Now Playing” tab, as indicated by the highlighted blue text and bar underneath. Unfortunately, there is no signifier such as a scroll bar or down arrow to indicate that you can scroll to view more movies. Instead, there is a slither of a bar that shows the preview of the next movie posters (highlighted in Figure 2), which can easily be misinterpreted as a horizontal scroll bar. In order to successfully signal to users to scroll, a vertical scroll bar can be added on the right side of the page or the size of the film posters can be minimized so that a larger preview of the next row can be visible to users. Additionally, nothing about the movie posters signifies that you can click on it to view where it’s playing and the showtimes. Both of these cases require knowledge in the head for how similar apps typically operate.
Some users may either swipe right and left to view more movies, but they would receive immediate feedback to let them know that they swiped to the Events tab instead (Figure 3), which is a different category from “Now Playing.” This is signaled by the “Events” tab now being highlighted in blue. The ability to swipe up, down, left, and right through the home screen utilizes natural mapping.
Movie screen
The icons in the red rectangle in Figure 4 signify to users the date and location that the film is playing. However, they may not be as perceptible to less experienced users because they are not bolded or highlighted in a different color. This can potentially lead to a mistake such as users booking a movie for the wrong date. It would be beneficial to make these icons look like more obvious buttons by bolding the text or adding an outline and drop shadow to signal to users that they can click on them to adjust their preferences.
Selecting a seat
Once users select a film and showtime, they are directed to a page to choose their seats (Figure 5). The map affords the ability to select your seat, while the key at the bottom is a signifier that lets users know exactly where they can select a seat. The occupied seats not being clickable is a constraint that informs users they are unable to choose those seats. Another constraint is the greyed out “Continue” button which prevents users from moving on until they make a selection. Once users choose a seat, they receive immediate feedback from the seat map automatically zooming in, the seat color going from purple (available) to red (selected), and the “Continue” button becoming clickable by turning white (Figure 6). These actions bridge the gulf of evaluation and the gulf of execution of selecting a seat.
Flexible solutions
The app also allows users to get to the purchasing screen in multiple ways, allowing flexibility in their actions. Rather than selecting a film from the home screen and then choosing a theatre, they can also navigate to the Our Theatres tab, select a theatre, choose a film, and then proceed with the purchasing process from there (Figure 7).
Conceptual modeling
The flow of purchasing movie theatre tickets mimics the process of physically buying tickets at the box office. Therefore, users with this kind of experience would use their conceptual model of purchasing tickets to successfully complete this task. In order to buy tickets, users must select a film, choose the showtime, pick their seats, indicate how many tickets they want to buy, and then enter their credit card information to check out, just as they would at the theatre’s box office.
The AMC app affords a great convenience of booking movie tickets online ahead of time and boasts a straightforward task flow, but there are opportunities for further improvements in their user interface.