Persona 01
First-time moviegoer.
New to the app, buying a ticket for tonight. Resists creating an account and just wants to pay and get in fast.
NEW USER
Guest checkout
Speed-first
CinépoIis
Our redesign of the ticket-buying flow lifted Cinépolis' online ticket sales 25%, then scaled into a global design system across five markets.
Entertainment
·
Mobile app · Website
·
Staff Augmentation & UI/UX Design
At a glance
5 markets. 5+ Years of Partnership
2022
2023
2024-2025
2026+
Drag / scroll →
team
Embedded
Product strategy, research, design, and front-end
research
Full journey
Moderated study, internal and external users
output
1 design system
Web, app, kiosk, and back-office
footprint
5 markets
Mexico, India, Argentina, Chile, Spain
The Client
One of the largest
cinema chains on Earth.
Entertainment · Staff Augmentation & UI/UX Design
Cinépolis is the fourth largest film exhibitor in the world. It runs roughly 6,800 screens across about 335 complexes in more than 17 countries, employs over 31,000 people, and holds more than 60% of the cinema market in Mexico.
Despite that scale, Cinépolis came to WANDR with a business problem hiding inside a design problem. Its mobile app and website were outdated and unreliable, and the friction was measurable at the till. Customers who could not buy a ticket online simply bought it somewhere else, or drove to the theater early to secure a seat in person. At Cinépolis' volume, small percentages of abandoned carts add up to real revenue walking out the door.
1971
Founded, Morelia, Mexico
17+ Countries
Bilingual and multimarket
6800
Screens across 335 Complexes
The Challenge
Customers were abandoning the purchase at the exact moment They were ready to pay.
A market leader with millions of moviegoers was running on a digital storefront that could not reliably complete its core transaction, and the friction was pushing customers, and their spend, straight to a competitor.
Problem 01
An outdated experience that was quietly killing conversions.
Stakeholders described the original website and app as "very old-style design" with "broken UX." Customers frequently could not complete basic tasks like buying a ticket, and some had to physically arrive at the theater early just to secure a seat. The digital storefront of a market leader was failing at its core job.
Problem 02
Market share leaking to a direct competitor.
Internal data showed customer loyalty shifting to Cinemex, driven by the friction in Cinépolis' own digital products. Poor usability was not just an experience problem, it was measurable revenue walking out the door.
Problem 03
An organization with almost no product maturity.
Cinépolis operated with an old-school, family-office structure and minimal design process. There was no user testing, no research practice, and no shared product methodology, and decisions were made almost entirely at the top. That left the company with no internal engine for improving its own experience.
Problem 04
A fragmented ecosystem with no shared design system.
Beyond the app and website sat kiosks, back-office systems, and separate country-specific products, each living in its own disorganized file system spread across multiple agencies and product teams. Nothing communicated with anything else, and engineers routinely rebuilt the same components from scratch because no central, documented, trusted source of truth existed.
Before / After
Same app, rebuilt for
The moment of purchase.
Drag the handle to see how the ticket-buying flow changed, from a broken checkout that was sending customers to Cinemex into a modern purchase experience built to convert.
Before
After WANDR
Our Role
From redesign to embedded team.
01
Product strategy
02
UX audit
03
User research and moderated usability testing
04
UX/UI design
05
Design system architecture and documentation
06
Front-end development
07
WordPress CMS integration
08
Embedded staff augmentation, a dedicated product team inside Cinépolis
Research
We tested the whole journey
before we redesigned it.
To fix the purchase flow with evidence rather than opinion, WANDR ran a moderated usability study across the entire Cinépolis journey, testing both internal stakeholders and external moviegoers against real task flows. Every screen, from opening the app to managing an order after purchase, was evaluated and tagged by severity: what worked, what was an opportunity, and what was outright friction.
The study covered the full path a customer takes: discovery and location, movie and showtime selection, seat choice, concessions and combo customization, checkout, and post-purchase order management.
01
Seat selection
A safety signal no one saw.
Over 60% of users completed the seat-selection task without ever noticing the color-coded room-health indicator meant to signal availability. The one cue that de-risked the choice went unseen, so the redesign had to make availability impossible to miss.
02
Checkout & loyalty
Loyalty was hard to find, right when it should pay off.
Roughly 30% of users struggled to locate their loyalty points at checkout, and several could not tell whether a discount had actually been applied. The reward that drives repeat visits was nearly invisible at the moment it mattered most.
03
Food & combos
One combo read as five separate orders.
A user who ordered a single "Combo Clásico" watched it split into five line items in the cart: "Pedí un combo clásico, pero parece que pedí estos 5 productos individuales." Bundles needed to stay legible as one purchase.
One app, 3 very different buyers.
Persona 02
Club Cinépolis regular.
Returning, logged-in loyalty member who buys often. Wants points and rewards visible, and a quick way back in.
rETURNING
Loyalty-driven
Points-focused
Persona 03
Family & group planner.
Booking for several people and adding food. Needs combos to stay clear and food to attach cleanly to an existing ticket.
Multi-ticket
Food & combos
Plans ahead
Fix the flow. Standardize the system.
Change How The Company Works.
3 Principles →
Principle 01Trust
01
Model.
Match the user's mental model. Where the flow mirrored patterns people already knew, comprehension was instant, so the redesign leaned on convention wherever a novel pattern was not earning its keep.
Principle 02Segment
02
Orient.
Give people a stable frame of reference. Users navigating the seat map wanted to see the whole room and keep their bearings while zooming, so spatial context became a requirement, not a nicety.
Principle 03Bingo
03
Consistency.
Make consistency the default. Selection behavior, visual hierarchy, and CTA copy varied subtly from screen to screen, and every inconsistency added cognitive load. Standardizing them reduced the mental tax of every step.
Principle 01 of 03→ Continue scrolling
THE KEY INSIGHT
The hardest problem wasn't the interface. It was the absence of process.
Cinépolis did not lack talent or ambition. It lacked the operating system that turns both into consistently good products: research, testing, documentation, and a shared source of truth. Redesigning the app fixed the symptom.
Embedding a team that changed how the company designs, decides, and hands off to engineering fixed the cause. That is why the work compounded. A better checkout recovers revenue once, but a modern product practice recovers it continuously.
Screen 01 of 08→ Scroll horizontally
Outcomes
What the work Moved
By the end of the engagement, Cinépolis had a modernized purchase flow, a global design system, and, for the first time, a product practice its own teams could run.
01 · Revenue
+25%
Increase in online ticket sales · via the modernized purchase flow
02 · Maturity
0 → 1
A product practice built from scratch · research and testing, now the standard
03 · System
4 → 1
Surfaces unified into one design system · web, app, kiosk, back-office
04 · Scale
5 Markets
One design system, live across all of them · Mexico, India, Argentina, Chile, Spain
Revenue figure reflects Cinépolis-reported impact from the redesigned purchase flow. Usability findings are drawn from WANDR's moderated study of the full purchase journey.
Client Voice
In their words.
“
The quality of the design system was impressive, and we found new insights about our own customers that we simply did not have before.
Armando Herrera
Head of UX, Cinépolis
