Product design
PlanIt by BookMyShow
BookMyShow is India’s leading e-commerce platform for movie and event tickets and one of the most loved brands and gained a lot more value after the revamp in 2015.
When the product started to look at different expansion possibilities; one direction that we took was to experiment with having a chat feature and banking on an increasing need to be connected socially. The first feature called Plan-it was introduced that was intended for friends to share movies, discuss showtimes and book their tickets - all without leaving the app. The primary goal of this feature was to engage.
Plan-it was released in early 2016 with MVP level of functionality and kept growing with incremental features. What started off as a basic chat allowing users to share movies from just the keyboard in the chatting interface, eventually was stitched together seamlessly in the rest of the pages of the product.
This of course came with the challenge of hampering the user's existing flow. Another hurdle was introducing a mandatory sign up which lost us some users and this possibly impacted a whole group not being on this platform.
The upside to this however was that we were able to add 1 Million sign-ups to the app from which other products like BMS's Wallet also benefitted!
All-in-all, working with this product has been an adventurous ride with all of its complex use cases but that only proved to add a lot of valuable insights for the BookMyShow as a product and the team.
Here are some snippets:
Landing screen for the first timers - Login flow.
After we had a healthy number of users showing interest, we introduced this design where we leveraged the profile pictures of their friends (when possible) to lure them in and create a sense of FOMO. This was also the time when everyone wanted to be socially connected.
Chat interface with voting feature
We also used profile pictures for the voting feature which reduced the need to send multiple messages while adding a visual treat to the interface.
Result:
We saw a heavy influx of college students use this feature since they made a lot of group movie plans and had the time to spare and weren't protective of another signup.
Overall, we discontinued this product since we weren't fast enough to keep shipping features that would keep the users engaged and a product within a product was often forgotten.
Whatsapp also gave us tough competition which it's quick advancements over the same year we took to launch this product.
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Future concepts:
From the features that did not go live, this was one where the users would see the offers of their cards upfront to initiate immediate action.
It could also host engaging Bollywood content like Snapchat then did. Today, in the world of stories, I am convinced this would be an exciting space.
Integration with Whatsapp
During the product cycle, Whatsapp had taken over the market and was experimenting with businesses as well. Here is a concept that we thought would work really well if WhatsApp adapted BookMyShow. This may still be a reality if WhatsApp chose to adapt local apps within itself like WeChat does.
Company: BookMyShow | Year: 2016