Saturday, May 12 2012

Alienation, Movies, Facepalms, and Business

Set facepalm to 'stunned'

 

Facepalm: the physical gesture of placing one's hand flat across one's face or lowering one's face into one's hand or hands. The gesture is found in many cultures as a display of frustration, embarrassment, shock, or surprise.

Last night I went out to see a movie with my wife. She enjoys loud, shout-y, explode-y action-adventure flicks, and while I prefer a well-nuanced dramatic movie about human feelings and emotional growth, but I'm willing to indulge her any time she'll go on a date with me. However, I have a lot of trouble with the movie experience, partly because of theatres themselves: if I want to cram myself into a confined space with bad seats, no legroom, stinky and inconsiderate strangers and horrifyingly dirty bathrooms, I'll book an airline ticket.

The other part of the problem relates to those stinky, inconsiderate strangers, particularly three groups:

1. People who bring small children (or worse, infants) to late movies filled with explode-y stuff and fast, violent imagery unsuitable for them.
2. People who will not shut up, either holding a conversation irrelevant to the movie or narrating it.
3. Anybody who uses a cell phone in any way, for any purpose during the movie.

Before any parents get angry, note that I don't go to movies before 9 pm--citizens in the single-digit age category should be in bed in the single-digit hour category. I'm not saying people with kids shouldn't be free to attend movies, but I am saying that keeping a toddler or infant up past a reasonable bedtime, and filling its tender noggin with explosions, monsters, and violent imagery doesn't seem like parent-of-the-year behaviour to me, and there's no way the poor things can sit quietly for two hours anyway.

This past week I heard an advertisement for a new kind of movie experience: VIP theatres. The pitch on the radio ad tried to highlight the value-added aspects of the experience (a bar selling alcohol beverages! Order pizza and snacks at your seats!) but I'm really too cheap to buy nine-dollar beers, so what caught my attention were three key elements to the experience: large seats with lots of legroom and space, 19 years and older only, and pre-order and select your seat. The VIP experience also had some decent features--separate bathrooms, print your ticket ahead of time and breeze through to the auditorium. Keen!

Having gone to the theatre last night, I can recommend VIP as an alternative to traditional movie-going. It was all as advertised: old cranky people like me, not a single cell-phone ring or dullard's narrative effort, and the seats we pre-chose were our favorites (three rows back from the screen, middle) and were quite roomy and comfortable--in particular, not having to share an armrest made me much more relaxed.

But I strongly doubt I'll do it again. Because of cineplex.com, and the insanely difficult, non-intuitive way they handled the ticket sales. If there had been an executive from the Cineplex company in my house Friday night through Saturday afternoon (the period in which I repeatedly attempted to buy tickets) I would have wound up repeatedly punching him in the groin so he could share the pain I felt trying to use his website. Not that it's the worst website in the world. In fact, it's probably pretty much the standard for many large-corporation web-sale portals. And that's the real problem: corporations never, ever get the point that they need to sell things. They always want to 'develop a consumer relationship' or 'create touchpoints', or 'enhance the user experience'. The kind of corporate officer that approved that website has never bought theatre tickets over the internet: in his rarefied air of stock options and feeding champagne to his racehorses, he has people for that. Thus, if the user experience feels like getting mugged for trying to hand money over to his corporation, why should he care?

My problem was pretty simple. I did a web search on 'silver city cinemas coquitlam'. I clicked on the first search result, here. I had a quick look and went to click on the 'VIP' link in the menu bar, but instead of taking me to the actual VIP theatre site at my chosen location, it kicked me to this page, which forced me to search a crowded, busy, graphics-intensive page for the Coquitlam cinema--the site that I had just been at! And the upper half of the page, the part where you automatically start looking for your goal, the link that will let you buy the tickets you've already decided on, is occupied by a corny graphical ad that only a senior VP of tastelessness could love. Space bar to scroll down, and I find the VIP link back to Silver City Coquitlam. There is an awful lot of irrelevant crap all over the page, but I sorted out the visual noise and persevered, and clicked the Silver City Coquitlam link, going through to . . . the exact page I had been at one click ago! Cue facepalm #1.

Picture more frustrated than actually shown

 

The link wasn't the VIP link I had been lead to believe: it was a connection to the general page for the theatre. Why? What logic is it that there's a link to something you need on the page that you need, only to find out it's an advertisement for that thing, and leads you back where you belonged? Because Cineplex doesn't get a single thing about consumer purchase behavior, that's why, and none of the people who approved this site have ever bought anything on-line.

Next step I figured that the VIP thingy was somewhere on the home page for the Coquitlam Cinemas. So I went a-scrollin', down to here:

 

Like I say, nuanced movies about feelings

 

So tell me where you would click to buy a VIP ticket? It's not immediately apparent, because designation is inside parentheses '(VIP 19+)', followed by 'NO PASSES'. Does that mean that there's no VIP tickets? Why is the date first--they only sell the tickets on the day of the showing, after all. Why are some of the show-times present as text but not links? Why would the time be up there if I can't buy it? Where's the category for me, the notional VIP purchaser? After considering these options philosophically for a little while (one dram of Scotch, to be precise) I clicked on the first one, hitting the 10:20 pm link, hoping for the best. Here's what I got.

Okey doke . . .

 

Fine, I guessed right. But now I've got a bunch of issues. First, I've only got 5 minutes to complete each screen hereafter, or I get kicked off and have to start again. This is probably so that reserved seats don't get hung up when somebody forgets and leaves their browser open while they play Angry Birds or go get a snack. But 5 minutes . . . what if I have an argument with my wife whose credit card we're going to use, or if I have to catch my cat because he's murdering a seagull on my favorite bedspread (hey, your homelife has quirks too). Fine, I'll stay focused and hurry so as not to tie up seats, but more on this later. One more thing: try hitting 'back' on your browser once you're on their website. They've set it up so you can't do that--if you want to get away from this site you've either got to open a new tab, open a new browser window, or open up the 'back' arrow on your navigation bar and choose a destination three back from where you are now. This is what it technically known as a CDM (Complete Dick Move). The only people who try to prevent you from backing out of a commercial transaction where you've not already made a legally recognised and enforceable commitment to make a purchase are time-share salesman and con-artists (but I repeat myself). It's a shameful way to conduct business and it instantly boils my blood--if it was a storefront the VP of cineplex.com would be standing between you and the door, toothpick in the corner of his mouth, sneering at you, 'Where do you think you're goin', bub?'

Now, you weren't about to leave without giving me money, were you?

This? This isn't a gun. It squirts 'buttery-flavour topping' onto the popcorn.

 

Next, I have to print out the ticket at home for it to be useful. Even if I've reserved and paid, unless I've got a printed ticket in hand I can't go into the cinema, and Purchases are non-refundable, meaning, do it our way or we'll keep your money and snidely point to this warning. Hmm, I don't print a ton of stuff at home, but I'm sure it will be fine.

Then comes the first corporate intrusion. I don't set up on-line accounts because in all of them, somewhere in the EULA, they install a permanent tracking link, kind of a super-cookie that follows your every move thereafter on the computer and use the data to either target you for advertising, sell your consumer information to other marketers, or target your relatives for kidnapping and assassination (foolish exaggeration? You've never read that EULA from beginning to end, have you? If you sign one and the company comes to your house and your head winds up pickled in a jar in a Tijuana sideshow, it's legal because you agreed to it when you signed their EULA).

Off I went to proceed to checkout, fully expecting to give money and get ticket. Ha ha ha, what an optimist! Just because they say you're going to the checkout, that doesn't mean they're finished abusing your trust as a consumer, oh no! Instead, you get this:

 

Why would this be relevant to my interests?

 

Cue facepalm #2. Another bunch of corporate marketing dickery. After promising me that I'll get to go to the checkout, they betray my trust by shilling me to sign up for their loyalty program. Note that signing up for such things subjects you to even worse invasion of privacy than clicking on that EULA did. You can wave goodbye to any notion of personal privacy ever again, and your wedding pictures will wind up on boxes of popcorn sold at Cineplex and your pets will be sold for animal testing. So the question is, do I skip SCENE & Proceed With Checkout, or do I just Proceed With Checkout? By this time I am functionally insane: I keep clicking on the same link, hoping for a different result. Rather than actually getting to check out my purchase, I get this:

Grrr . . .

 

Nope, not allowed to check out yet. Rather than have all vouchers, loyalty programs, gift certificates, etc all on one page, they've got another screen between me and giving them money. I put in for two tickets and do my insane-monkey-pulling-the-same-lever-hoping-for-a-different-result schtick and get this:

Huzzah, this is progress, surely?

Don't call me shirley.

 

Okay, looks like the home stretch. I get to confirm my purchase and pick my seats. Except they seem to have assigned them to me instead of letting me pick. After a minute to read the screen I realised I had to un-click the mustard-coloured seats before I could choose my actual seats. For what reason might a web designer added this function? If this screen is in place to let you select seats (as the little note on top says) then why do they force you to unselect a seat in order to select one? Don't worry, that's a rhetorical question. Captain Corporate would tell you it was to assign the best remaining seats to consumers who don't wish to go to the trouble of selecting for themselves. The truth is, it's a chunk of functionality that his nephew, the web designer stuck in so that he could demonstrate his status as chief HTML monkey. Nephew may never have actually worked in any kind of retail environment, or engage in other human activities like bathing, speaking in complete sentences or interacting with live humans, but, by jaysus, he can lard in irrelevant features with the best of them! By this time I want to kill everyone in human history who ever worked for Cineplex, the Internet or any kind of entertainment ever, including cave-painting, Punch and Judy shows and kazoo recitals.

Eventually, somewhat before the Xanax and whisky ran out and my brains exploded, I chose some seats and moved on to a fairly normal payment screen, complete with 'Verified by Visa'. Although they try a few more things to get me to buy into some of their nonsense, I get the thrill of anticipation that I might be able to pay and go back to what I was doing before this notion of going to a movie popped up and ruined my afternoon. They want your email address, but you can actually count on their promise not to use it for nefarious purposes--that's actually rather naughty under Canadian law.

Can this really be the end?

 

So I proceed to checkout, where I have a small issue. I have more than one credit card, used for various business and personal purposes. I update my passwords every 90 days, and the ones I use are considered 'very strong', which means they're complicated and easy to screw up when you enter the long string of letters, digits, punctuation marks and whatever other options the encryption service lets me use. When entering my credit card info for my personal card I got it wrong three times in a row, and got locked out of they system. Meh, my bad, but not critical, because I've got another card. However, because fiddling around with cards timed me out I had to go back and re-navigate those screens all over again. Cue facepalm #3. By now my face and palm were getting calloused.

When I finally got to the seat choice screen again the seats I wanted were shown as occupied. In an hour of fiddling around and repeating my choices, no seats had been updated or shown as chosen. Suddenly, after I chose them, my personal favorite seats are gone and unavailable . . . and not another single seat has been sold. I rapidly concluded that some part of the functionless, clueless web design had reserved my seats, but was too stupid to unreserve them when I couldn't pay. They were locked off to me, and even though I was technically the one who had reserved them, I couldn't pay for them now, nor get access to them through any means I could figure out. My arm was now too tired for facepalming. I was reduced to irritable whimpers.

And here's the kicker. Look at that price: thirty-nine bucks. For a movie. But I want to pay it because I want my three consumer desires (no babies, no chatter, no cell phones) satisfied. That's what I've been promised, but that's not what Cineplex wants to give me. They want to give me loyalty programs, sign-ups, intrusive accounts and seats they assign, not seats I choose. Forty bucks, more-or-less and I'm not getting what I want in any hurry, even though I have been trying as hard as I know how to for a very long, frustrating time to force my money into their hands, and they keep dodging, obfuscating, counter-offering and trying to get me to do things I have no interest in.

Finally, I chose my second-best seats and paid with a credit card that I could remember the password to. Then I went to print the tickets. Remember, no printy = no goey to the showy. I have two printers at home, one of which isn't working (I use the attached scanner) and another that works but is an ink-hog. After going out and buying a new ink cartridge, I finally printed off my ticket. But why, really? Why couldn't they simply send a copy of the bar code on the ticket or a QR code to my email address or my smart-phone where I could then display it from my phone at the theatre and get in without murdering trees for a ticket that goes straight into the garbage one second after I get into the theatre?

Because they don't care what kind of experience I have--or at least it's never occurred to them to think about it. After they've got my money, they tell me it's non-refundable, even if my printer explodes and I can't get to another one and use it by showtime. Yes, I acknowledge it: this is a self-inflicted problem. But isn't the point that you should make your process as consumer-friendly as possible, including accounting for the kind of problems your consumers might commonly have (such as bad printers)? Or is the goal for Cineplex to abuse their consumers to the point of enraging them while standing back cooly and announcing, 'We have your money. Screw you, loser.'

I stewed about this for the last 24 hours, and talked to a couple of friends in the retail sector about it. This kind of thing is actually common--try buying a high-ticket consumer good in a mass-market store and you'll see. I was buying a good set of stereo speakers a few years ago and I swear, I went in to three stores where I announced that I wished to purchase a specific, expensive speaker model, and asked if they could deliver it today. At two of the stores the salesdrones actually said, 'Those are really expensive--are you sure those are the ones you want?'.

 

 SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! JUST TAKE MY MONEY! BLEARRRGH!

 

Think that through: I came in and announced that they had made a sale, closed the deal and asked for a delivery slot. And then they stood in my way, refusing to take my money--and it wasn't chump change, more like a sale the clerk could brag about around the water cooler. And this isn't uncommon! Everyone I know has a similar story where they've gone into an establishment trying to buy something, only to be frustrated by the very people that were supposed to complete their transactions.

Note: not a picture of anyone associated with Cineplex.

 

Which leads me to something I heard decades ago, back when I worked in a bank. We had a security lecture, delivered by a former con-man who had specialised in hitting banks, getting away with big hauls. Reformed, he told us how to spot scams. Afterwards I asked him a couple of questions about how he made what, in the cold light of day, were patently ridiculous schemes. First, he told me, don't give too many details: offer something too good to be true and the mark will paper over any ridiculous plot holes with their own imagination--much as I papered over the obvious opportunities this online process affords Cineplex to frustrate me in my desire to have a good theatre-going experience.

But the second thing he said always stuck with me. Verbatim, 'Always make it as easy as possible for the mark to give you the money. Never put any impediment in the way of the money getting into your pocket.' Not just an aphorism for con-men, it's a great philosophy for businesses of all kinds: don't prevent your customers from giving you money--duh. But this simple truism hit home a lot harder just a few days ago when I read an article in Fast Company by Aaron Levie, The Simplicity Thesis. Here's where Levie's rubber meets the road:

Any market where unnecessary middlemen stand between customers and their successful use of a solution is about to be disrupted. Any service putting the burden on end users to string together multiple applications to produce the final working solution should consider its days numbered. Any product with an interface that slows people down is ripe for extinction.

He's absolutely right. In this crazy-fast changing world, you make your customer work any harder than not-hard-at-all and they're going to take the first alternative to your product or service that demands less, and has greater simplicity. And so they should. he even gives a 5-point plan to reduce complexity:

1. Think end to end.  Simplicity relates to the entire customer experience, from how you handle pricing to customer support.
2. Say no.  Kill features and services that don’t get used, and optimize the ones that do.
3. Specialize.  Focus on your core competency, and outsource the rest--simplicity comes more reliably when you have less on your plate.
4. Focus on details.  Simple is hard because it’s so easy to compromise; hire the best designers you can find, and always reduce clicks, messages, prompts, and alerts.
5. Audit constantly.  Constantly ask yourself, can this be done any simpler? Audit your technology and application frequently.

If Cineplex just did #1 and #4, they'd win my heart in a . . . well, in a heartbeat. Because I really want to love the concept.

And so we come to 'Where does that leave Tim?' Well, I did go to the theatre, eventually, and I did enjoy the service I purchased--big comfy seats, didn't have to share an armrest (an issue when you're as wide as a phone booth) no cell phones or crying babies and an easy check-in and walk through the nicely appointed theatre--the bathrooms were pristinely clean and well stocked--I went twice (shouldn't drink tea before a long movie) and each time it looked like I was the first person to ever use the loo--amazing, considering how terrible theatre washrooms usually are.

But I seriously don't think I'll go again. The downright abusive nature of the user purchase interface leaves me uninterested in keeping Cineplex in business. I'm probably going to go back to waiting several months for the consumer release of the movie, and watch it in my living room--I have a nice TV, a comfy couch that I only have to share with people I love, clean bathrooms and the beer is a lot cheaper. Too bad, because when there's a better user experience, I am one of the first to glom onto it: when bars in Vancouver went smoke-free, I started going, for the first time in decades. But nobody ever made me kill an afternoon buying a ticket to a bar with an intrusive, abusive user interface, because they knew better.

The other place it leaves me is in communication with the Cineplex folks. I'm hoping they'll reply to my inquiry with some sort of an explanation. If they come through, I'll post it here.

How about you folks? Is there a product or a service you really want to patronise, but simply can't because of the impediments the company puts in your way? What would you do to improve their offering? And did you complain, or just take your money elsewhere--or nowhere at all?

 One last thing: those seats that I couldn't re-reserve? Nobody sat in them. Sigh.

 

 

 

Posted by Big Angry Tim II: Revenge of the Tim AT 1:00PM

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