Cinépolis

A digital transformation for Latin America's largest cinema chain: one navigation framework across web, app and kiosk, and a purchase flow that sells the ticket and the food together.

Discovery with eighteen stakeholders, a navigation framework, wireframes and flows, and a component system, run in Spanish.

One purchase. A person picks a film, a showtime, their seats and something to eat in one flow, pays once, and leaves with one QR code, on whatever screen they happen to be holding.

That put the concession inside the ticket. Nachos, a drink and a combo are offered right after the seats, with the sizes and the upsell built into the same steps, so the food stops being a second system the visitor has to find.

Underneath it sat one navigation framework for the website, the app and the lobby kiosk. Films, food and drinks, Club Cinépolis and events, in that order, everywhere.

Cinépolis is the largest cinema chain in Latin America, with theaters from Mexico to Peru. Its digital experience had grown one release at a time: a website, an app, kiosks in the lobby and a loyalty club, each with its own navigation and its own idea of what a visit was.

In the app as it stood in July 2022, a visitor chose a country, a city and a theater before seeing a single film, and food and drink lived on a separate flow with its own upsell. The parts of a night out were there. The night out was not.

A kiosk in a lobby line, a phone in a hand and a laptop at home are three different problems, and the chain needed them to be one product. The framework had to hold on all three without the kiosk becoming a website on a pole.

It also had to hold across a company. Marketing, film programming, IT, omnichannel and revenue, strategic planning and the organization's development team each owned a piece of the visit, and each worked in Spanish. The engagement ran in Spanish from the first meeting, which is where the trust came from.

Discovery ran on site. Stakeholder workshops with eighteen people across six departments, based in Morelia and Mexico City. A landscape audit of the chains Cinépolis competes with. A walk through the existing app screen by screen, and time at the lobby kiosks watching staff take people through a purchase.

The chain's own audience research, in Spanish, sat under all of it: how different people live the cinema, what makes the visit better and what makes it worse. The readout turned that into guiding principles, quick wins the teams could ship first, and a feature matrix the program was then sequenced against.

Experience design and strategy, as a Fantasy engagement. I led the discovery and the readout, wrote the guiding principles and the quick wins, and built the navigation framework the three surfaces share. Then the wireframes and flows for the purchase, from the listing through seats, food and checkout to the ticket, and the account, sign-up and club flows around it.

The interface was built on an Atomic Design component system, so the tertiary pages the chain publishes constantly, promotions, FAQs, contact, were planned to run on twenty to thirty reusable components instead of new templates. The finished work was presented to Cinépolis's leadership as a before and after of the experience they had started with, in Spanish, in December 2022.

The listing leads with what is showing tonight and filters by projection type and room, so IMAX and the premium rooms are a choice rather than a search. The film page carries the trailer, the synopsis and the showtimes on one screen, and the purchase starts from there.

At the end of the flow the ticket is a QR code on the phone, with the food order on it. Club Cinépolis sits beside the purchase as three tiers a visitor can compare on one screen, and joins the flow as a way to pay.