I recently took it upon myself to compare three online movie ticket purchasing websites: Fandango*, movietickets.com and Arclight Cinemas. By comparing the features, design, content and user flow of similar websites, one can gain invaluable knowledge about their own sites.
When you compare your website to what a competitive website is doing, you will learn:
What your website or experience is doing right
What your website or experience is doing wrong
What your competitors are doing right
What your competitors are doing wrong
This is a great jumping off point in improving your own website or experience.
This graphic only shows some some of the insights I discovered when comparing websites. My brief overview is below:
Comparative Analysis is a valuable process for getting your website up to par. See what other websites are getting right and wrong, and you can modify your own website accordingly.
* At the time of publishing this post, Fandango had not yet released its redesigned website and mobile app. Therefore many of the specific features I discuss here will no longer be applicable. However, going this process was still a great learning tool.
I know that Fandango will be launching a redesign very soon, so the shelf life of my analysis is ver limited. Still, I would like to share with you a few things I learned when analyzing Fandango.com website on the desktop:
If something looks like a button, then it should be a button. The “Find Movie Times + Buy Tickets” looks like a button, but is not. Best not to confuse the user.
Movie posters can be too small and sometimes difficult to read the title. Maybe use a simpler image to illustrate film? And therefore help me read the title of the film.
Use the user’s language, according to Jakob Nielsen’s “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.” On the Fandango site: Features> I thought that meant Feature films. This language could be confusing to some users. It was to me.
When analyzing the movie tickets.com website on the computer/desktop, I discovered a few key points:
Highlight theaters where I can buy the tickets from, not just all of them
Make the CTA (Call to Action) button clear. I want to buy movie tickets. Make it easy for me. Just like Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think.”
I found this to be a particular pain point: there is a long list of theaters with no address or map. How do I know how far away the theaters are?
movie tickets.com Comparative Analysis of the computer/desktop version.
