13 Apr 09 Skycity Cinemas – You’ve Failed!

Last night I was out with a friend and decided we wanted to check out the movie Watchmen. We were at dinner, so I did not have access to a computer. To cut a long story short, I spent 10 minutes trying to find show times, but to no avail. Skycity Cinemas have struggled to make ends meet in New Zealand last night was a taste of why that is:

Their website is too heavy and takes too long to load
There is no mobile WAP site / Iphone site etc.
The Movie times service on Vodafone Live! does not work
A phone number was difficult to find and when dialled, I got no answer!

Details of each of these issues and solutions are described below:

Skycitycinemas.co.nz is image and flash heavy, but most people still have a dial-up connection in.
Of the 1,504,000 internet users in New Zealand (March 2008, Statistics New Zealand)

Broadband: 891,000
Dialup: 613,000

Download Times for Skycitycinemas.co.nz*

Connection Rate	Download Time
14.4K	315.90 seconds
28.8K	163.65 seconds
33.6K	141.90 seconds
56K	89.70 seconds
ISDN 128K	35.38 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps	13.48 seconds

One and a half minutes is far too long for a website to load, but as the saying goes, you don’t have to outrun the tiger, just the guy standing next to you:

Download Times for Hoyts.co.nz*

Connection Rate	Download Time
14.4K	515.06 seconds
28.8K	266.73 seconds
33.6K	231.26 seconds
56K	146.11 seconds
ISDN 128K	57.51 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps	21.80 seconds

For more about Hoyts, check out Mathew Sanders post:
Dear Hoyts: here’s 5 tips on showing movie times on your website

With over 90% of New Zealand’s population owning a mobile phone, the cinema has failed by not making it easy for people to access them via this medium. I was forced to chew through my meagre 10MB Vodafone daily data allowance

Vodafone’s Movies feature in its Sim Lifestyle section is absolutely worthless. It hasn’t worked once in the 2 years i’ve tried to use it. (Atleast they didn’t charge me for the txt requests, oh those angels)

Solutions:

Functionality is more important than form. The flash and heavy imagery needs to be stripped down. Removing the flash module would be a good start, followed by caching the css and images. Also lighter image formats (PNG rather than JPEG) would make sense. View a full checklist here.
With a larger mobile audience than pc-internet audience, a WAP site is essential, as well as iphone / Blackberry optimised versions that are light,fast and functional. A good design would consist of just 2 search boxes, one for the movie name and the other for location. A list of movie times should follow on the next page. Added bonus: Txt a shortcode to buy tickets!
Sort out the Movie times feature on Vodafone Live! or get rid of it. Skycity Cinemas should have their own shortcode that people can simply text QUEEN ST WATCHMEN to and get a list of movie times returned. Again, “a reply with TIME QUANTITY (3.15pm X2) to buy would be a powerful call to action. This service should be promoted on all of their marketing collatoral, including their website, emails, movie money booklets, tickets and receipts. Ideally, Skycity should provide this themselves, but theres no reason a service like Flicks.co.nz couldn’t do this either.
An easy to find phone number and good IVR system that tells you movie times. (Don’t switch it of after hours! What if I want to by tickets for another day?)

Looking back, this is in fact my second post about the flaws of Skycity Cinemas. The first was with regard to the launch of their ‘Film Squad’ product. My gripe was that they issued actual plastic cards rather than use someone’s mobile phone number as their membership ID, a much more convenient and less archaic solution.

Functionality is more important than style.

Site speed tests conducted using: Websiteoptimization.com, www.webpagetest.org.nz