Usability details illustrated by a cinema ticket

Communication design—poorly categorized by some as "graphic design"—is an essential part of businesses, especially those whose brands have a direct relationship with consumers. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few European countries such as Switzerland or Germany, communication design has not been given due importance within organizations.

In my opinion, absolutely every piece of material developed with the aim of communicating something should pass through the hands of a designer, from a billboard to the memos pinned to a corkboard at the office. The point is that a designer knows how to present information so that it is clearer, easier to read, and even pleasant.

Being so particular about these details turns every outing into an expedition in which I collect examples of bad design in my mind: an illegible typeface chosen for a shop sign, a billboard whose lettering is too small to be read from a moving car at a distance, a poor choice of colors on a flyer handed out in the street, et cetera.

Among many examples, yesterday I found a very ordinary one that perfectly supports my argument: a cinema ticket. This is what a ticket from the Cinépolis chain looks like today:

It is obvious that its planning did not pass through the hands of a designer, or at least not a good one. Let us first consider the purpose of this object. The ticket fulfills, I believe, two purposes:

1. Providing information to the user (which movie, which auditorium, which seat, at what time)
2. Proving to cinema staff that the person paid for admission.

The first point is the most important to me because, when I speak of the user, I do not mean only the customer who bought the ticket but also the cinema employee who, upon receiving it, must quickly identify the information. Both people are users of the object, and both need information to be communicated to them through it.

It is not that I set out to analyze the ticket; rather, the problems became apparent when I tried to find out which auditorium I should go to. When I could not find the information quickly, I realized that I had been in this same situation before, scanning the ticket with my eyes and unsuccessfully trying to find the information.

Below, I will mark some design errors on the ticket in red and some information that I consider irrelevant or redundant for the ticket's purpose in orange, and then explain those points underneath:

1. The most obvious problem at first glance is the watermark on the paper. I imagine the paper is printed with this watermark as a security measure to prevent counterfeit tickets from being produced. However, the contrast is very strong, so the image ceases to be a watermark and becomes a visual obstacle. Having such a high-contrast image as the background of a reading area is a serious usability error.
2. Hierarchies are the biggest problem. Our brains are designed to find different levels of relevance in things, which is why hierarchies in design allow greater importance to be given to the most important information. It is not so much an aesthetic matter as a functional one. As you can see above, in the parts of the design marked with the number two, we have four relevant pieces of information that have been given a hierarchy through type size and their position on the ticket. The hierarchy, however, is poorly conceived. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of both the customer and the employee who works at the cinema. What is the most relevant information we want to know? I would say the auditorium comes first; the seat comes second for the customer, while the type of ticket (adult / child / complimentary) comes second for the employee; then comes the showtime and, finally, the movie title, since as the customer I know which movie I am going to see, and as the employee I do not care. Broadly speaking, we could distinguish the basic hierarchies. Another error here is the illegibility of the typeface. Take as an example the section identifying the auditorium, which says "CONTROL INTERNO SALA 8," and bear in mind that the physical ticket is smaller than the image you are probably seeing on your screen.
3. The orange boxes show irrelevant or redundant information that I would remove if I were designing the ticket; it is merely a source of distraction.
4. Another question we should ask is whether so much paper—compare the size of the ticket with my thumb—is needed to hold so little information.

That is why I designed a simple example showing how I would design this ticket. This example focuses on functionality rather than aesthetics. I spent no more than 20 minutes making it because my main interest was to show how the information on the ticket can be given a functional purpose. It should also be clarified that there are printing constraints arising from the machines used by Cinepolis. Nevertheless, this example clearly illustrates the hierarchy of the information that matters to each party:

The main emphasis has been placed on the auditorium and the seat in the section on the left, which the customer will keep upon entering the area where the auditoriums are located. At that moment, the only information the customer needs is the auditorium number and the seat number. In the section on the right, which the cinema employee keeps, one can quickly see which auditorium the ticket is for, what type of ticket it is, and which showing it is for.

What I like about this kind of design is that the object transforms according to the context. When I receive it as a customer, I get all the information I may need, and when I enter the auditorium area, the information is reduced to only what I may need in the new context.

I believe that if an idea like this can be conceived and sketched in 20 minutes, something much better could be done by having a communication designer at Cinépolis develop this kind of material.