TGV Cinemas Website Biggest Weaknesses

Tanjong Golden Village (TGV) cinemas as long as I can remember was one of the first modern cinema theatres I visited – after Rex and Ruby. And in this millennium, online ticket booking is a must for most ticket oriented business. The power of convenience, time saving and escape from the odours of the masses in queue for a small added fee.

Right now, consumer experiences (or, user experience) online is the defining factor from a confirmed sale or abandoned sale. Well, if the TGV management or web team does pick this up. Here are the biggest weaknesses I picked up:

No website address redirection

Did you know, if you accessed tgv.com.my without the www into the browser address bar, your customers are left hanging or facing a dead end? Well, now you know.

And yes, if your frequent customers are less than 30 years old, they’d know they can access a website without the www prefix. They are the Gen-Y group after all.

Seat reservation and Online seat booking is confusing

And, misleading. Have a look at this screenshot for a moment.

I’d understand the management is doing its best to curb users who book online and don’t attend, but it’s either the illustration has to be improved or there should be another solution to curb the problem. But, this wasn’t the reason I didn’t want to pay you online for my tickets.

Single seat gap restriction is good

But, not smart enough. I’d say if management saw a drop in online booking, I’d pinpoint the problem to the new system setup when selecting seats.

The message reads:

You can not select new seats that leave single seat gap.

The green seats in the image are what I selected. Clearly, the system is not smart enough to detect I selected the center row and I do NOT have a choice to leave a single seat gap at the side (not like I’m anti-social and want to leave a gap between the guy on the right).

Then, when I looked onto the right I noticed a user managed to select a single seat gap in the row. It’s either he selected 4 seats or someone selected 2 seats on the right before he could select 2 seats in the center row.

Ultimately, the system is not smart enough.

Well, if you know the management in TGV (especially one who pays attention to online media), ask him/her to read this and get their web solutions provider to improve the user experience for TGV. Otherwise, start working with Simpleet Solutions.

The Worst Featured Topics Wesbite Presentation

Featured topics in a website or blog are hard to miss. In a website, we either have rotating banners or carousels. In a blog, we’ll normally find carousels most likely powered by plugins – WordPress, woot! The idea is simple enough to interpret and hard to get wrong. But I was proven wrong, when I stumbled on this.

Nope, those are not banners – at least, I don’t believe they were suppose to be. They are suppose to be clickable topics for you to read more about.

As shocked as you, I couldn’t believe how a simple visual communication for featured topics was made into a marketplace like the screenshot. Sigh.

And, these aren’t static banners. They were animated banners! I thought I had traveled back in time when we used blink for all our text and no image was left not animated in a webpage.

 

Anyway, I’d really appreciate it if the company hired my Malaysia website design company to make things right. Because, this is definitely not even reader friendly.

Why You Should Not Do The Five Second User Interface Test Often

Previously, I wrote about a new online service I found online called; fivesecondtest. To me, it’s a free online user interface design test service. The invaluable benefit of putting your design up for a test is you’ll get user centric feedback. Though this isn’t a full fledged usability test.

Anyway, here are a few reasons I noticed why it may be unhealthy to use this to test too often. When I say often, it’s sitting and reviewing 4-5 continuous homepage designs.

Grown accustom to a single viewpoint

For example, website users have developed the habit of expecting the logo to be the top left and the main menu either top or left. If you reviewed 4-5 homepage designs continuously, your reviews isn’t from a fresh perspective anymore.

Eyes maintain previous viewing area

Image playing a shooter game where enemies spawned at the same place – same concept. By the fifth homepage design, your eyes are not wandering around the monitor but fixed on an area now.

Well, these were 2 observations I came across when I did some of the tests continuously. However, I personally still believe this is a great service and would love to see other features like:

• Ability to set custom duration time
• Mouse gesture tracking (CrazyEgg API integration maybe)
• API availability

Have you tried the fivesecondtest? What did you think of it?

Free Online User Interface Mockup Design Test Service

From the Sitepoint newsletter, they featured a new free user interface mockup design test online. The free online service is called; fivesecondtest. It’s a user community generated test to get feedback from millions of online users on your mockup designs.

This might not be a full fledged usability test with cameras or mouse gesture tracking, but it’s good enough to learn about the effectiveness in your design mockup.

Imagine, first time users attention was suppose to be drawn to the product positioned on the left. However, many users gave feedback what they saw first was the registration and price positioned on the right. This is proof enough to rethink the layout and optimize it better.

However, through my observation and personal use giving feedback on random mockups, you can’t use this service too often. I’ll do a followup article on the reason and things I’d like to see added later.

Create an Effective Website Under Construction Homepage

Ideas are everywhere! And I found Modal’s website not long ago when doing some research for a client. They were featured in one of the CSS galleries for their new website landing page. Or, I’d say their functional under construction page.

Who said under construction pages always needed the “Men at Work” signage or the yellow-black bar barrier with a huge message telling visitors your website is still under construction.

Think out of the box whenever you’ve a website undergoing maintenance, construction (new website) or even, when webpage errors arise.

Have some fun and stop being a stick.