Movie theater usability blunder
The biggest Belgian movie theater group, Kinepolis, has had a terrible history when it comes to their website. But today I was really amazed how they scr*wed it up this time.
I must admit, I usually don’t have time to watch movies so the site may have been brand new. I tried to have a look at which movies run in my local cinema and when you click on the listing of a theater, you get a page like this.
While one would expect this is a (X)HTML listing, their web company actually managed to develop this in Flash. Let’s assume they had a solid reason for this. Maybe they were on the edge of bankruptcy and Adobe promised them a bailout in return of a commitment to Flash applications. Must be something like that.
Anyway, I want to be forgiving and look past the use of Flash. But the worst thing is it could have gone by without my notice if it didn’t try to middle-click the entries in the list. Because it’s Flash, it causes a scroll cursor to display instead of opening the movie in a new tab!
I am probably not the only person that uses new tabs a lot to compare links. Even if there are only a limited number of people with a middle-click-autism like me, it’s a sad sad sad thing for Kinepolis.
Since I still don’t know which movie I want to see, let’s have a look at what their competitors have to offer.
Tags: usability
