IMAX.COM
Differentiating themselves in a difficult landscape where streaming rules and bearing the torch of the magic of movies in the theatre into the future.
Problems to Solve
Streaming services have been on the rise for over a decade, and in a post COVID world, people aren’t heading to the box office like they used to. Regardless, IMAX is still selling seats and finding a way to make physically coming to the theatre a necessity.
With all of that interest, IMAX was running into problems communicating details about showtimes, theatre features, film type and so much more to their audience. Advanced users shared this information in corners of the internet like reddit, but there was no official location for most people to be able to find and understand. IMAX.com was the obvious place where this information should live, but in its 2024 state, a lot of those details were scattered across the site and not easily discoverable.
Lack of Clarity
For most casual movie goers, they only interact with IMAX when there is a movie they are told they must go see in particular. This means its technological offerings, such as 360 planetariums, 3D screens, 70mm, or laser projection and 12 channel sound, which although impressive is not something most people are researching about when going to the theatre.
When coming to the website, all of this information wasn’t easy to find or be understood. As well, when looking for a showtime the UI became overwhelming and the Information Architecture made the user flow exceptionally difficult. Dates would jump wildly from one movie to another and locations would appear and disappear when picking different movies.
Showtime Windows
When films are looking at when they’re going to release, they organize with IMAX for a set window of time where they will be the primary film being shown. These windows will vary in length, but with several films debuting a month, that window could be a week or less. Short windows and limited tickets are great for creating scarcity and buzz, but for new customers this often leads to missing the window entirely by looking for tickets only after hearing the buzz about a particular title.
Individual theatres are also able to offer additional showtimes along with other titles for limited additional runs in bids to allow people to see what they may have missed the first time around. However, because it is so individual to the location, communicating these additional shows to users can be even harder to know about than the initial window.
Users were finding it hard to know when these tickets became available, or how to even manually stay on top of it themselves as the site didn’t aid in that endeavor.
Solutions
With these problems and more, there was no single fix that could be made, instead it would require an intensive overhaul in targeted locations.
Get Tickets
When users are looking at the site, they’re usually driven by 3 things; The Movie, the Date, and the Theatre. The past site only allowed the user to start with one of those (usually the Movie) and break down results from there based on first date available and then proximity to a theatre. The problem is, that’s not always how a user is going to want to do it. What if they want to see what’s playing a week from today? What if they want to see what their preferred theatre is playing this weekend, even though its not the closest?
This is why we constructed an overhauled Get Tickets page. You can pick from which of the three main cross sections you want to start with and can further refine your search from there.
On the Movie tab, the dates display the whole designated run of the title, making it easier to understand just how long it will be available with a glance instead of clicking to advance the date one day at a time possibly 2 dozen times.
The Date tab lets you pick one particular day to see what is playing everywhere near you. This is much more handy if you want to find a movie on a single date, regardless of what may be showing. Since not every theatre that offers IMAX showtimes will necessarily have something showing each day, it makes for a much more definitive accounting of what is playing near you instead of going movie by movie or location by location.
Finally, if you know the locations you like to go to, whether they’re the closest or not, you can pick that specific cross-section of theatres on the Theatres tab and see what is playing when.
By offering this new ticketing tool, traffic has steadily increased to this page as well as its conversion rate by x% YoY. As well, user complaints about missing showings due to not knowing they existed was reduced dramatically.
Coming Soon
The vast majority of marketing around what is going to be in theatres will always lean more heavily to the large blockbusters, but for IMAX in particular, that is only just part of what is being shown. Documentaries, Anime titles and other titles specifically shot or tuned for the MAX screen are being shown off and on all the time, and could easily be missed. Sure it’s not coming out for the first time, but who would want to miss a two day window to see Studio Ghibli’s Spirited away shown in unbelievable clarity like never before?
In redesigning the Movies page, we made sure to make it clear just how much there is to see in IMAX while being clear and upfront about when it’s showing and to what extent its viewing in IMAX is simply a must.
What is Now Playing is distinct from what is coming up.
What has tickets vs what doesn’t is apparent without having to click into each specific title.
Looking for past titles to see if there are any one off showings coming up? The All Movies archive at the bottom has everything you need.
My IMAX Accounts
The culmination of everything we had done to tune the various parts of the website was the release of My IMAX Accounts. By signing up, a user would be able to take everything imax.com has to offer and curate it to specifically what they care about.
Users are able to set which Theatres are their favorites, and see a rundown of what those theatres are showing on any particular day. Favoriting movies lets you know as soon as tickets are available. Favoriting both will provide you with ticket information for that movie as soon as its out at only the theatres that matter to you. This also allows you to be notified as soon as new tickets or showtimes are released days, weeks, or even years after the initial release.
For the casual IMAX goer, it is an easy way to stay on top of what’s coming, and for the die hard IMAX fans, they will know the minute they can try to get their optimal seat and their favorite screen. As time moves on, users will continue to get additional ways to customize and stay up to date, and can be rewarded for their collection of favorites with additional merch and promotions.
Steady growth with minimal promotion has had this feature off to a great start and with the full promotion and release, IMAX is looking to create a one-stop shop of where users can find the best theatre experience with the content they want to see available anywhere.
