Working on weekends and holidays has implications for marital bliss. I tried to compensate via movie tickets for the latest flick.
Since I was away from the office and at client location, I decided to use mobile ticket booking apps. My first choice was BookMyShow App. The start was very quick – dates selected, movie selected, theatre selected, tickets chosen…but oh oh…Try again ! It happened for 3-4 times. Patience is a virtue, but not always.
Let me try the PVR App. It was trying to auto-detect my location. It tried and it tried and it tried. I was wondering why did it not have an option for me to input my location manually.
Mobile Maven Kinjan was with me. He tried to download a multi-booking app on Blackberry App World. He got weird results when he typed Book My Show. I tried Cinemax App. All were same !
Finally, I gave up ! We had spent more than 45 minutes on this exercise. It had also partly to do with our own bias and secret hope that some Mobile App would work. You always believe in the medicine you preach – mobile nirvana !
I went to the theatre on the way back to home. Got my tickets booked in 90 seconds via the good old box office counter!
There were many culprits – badly designed apps, faulty logic, failure in back-end theatre connectivity, unreliable 3G Networks, discovery of new apps, failure of thinking customer experience etc. Think like the end user when designing the app – remove our internal bias – and the magical Instagram and Flipboard like app would there! And would create more smiles !
Harit Kothari
Good thoughts. I am agree to most, except 3G connectivity issue (which isn’t that important – probably because its unavoidable).
Just to extend your thoughts about the idea – ICICI bank’s iMobile does this pretty well. They’re internally using bookmyshow.com’s API!! Of course, that also has some of the above mentioned issues, but the fault handling is much better – for me it works seamlessly well if I reach to seat selection level.