What we’re doing to transform the digital service for our cinemas

At the BFI, we’re on a mission to grow our digital reach and transform the experience of accessing all our services, online. It’s a big part of the strategy that takes us to our 100th birthday in 2033.

For the last 6 months, we’ve been redeveloping the BFI Southbank website to improve the experience of customers when they are browsing our programme, deciding what to watch and booking tickets.

Our existing ‘What’s on’ digital service is far from optimal. It is a longstanding and continuous source of frustration for many users. Our internal publishing processes, led by the production of the printed BFI Southbank Guide, are also complex and inefficient.

This programme of work is a fantastic opportunity to meet different ambitions simultaneously. As well as making the experience for users better and making our programmes more accessible, we are improving internal workflows, and doing more to connect BFI services and standardise user-experience and visual design across our products.

The redesigned digital programme experience will be integrated with our third-party box office and ticket booking platform, and is underpinned by a new content management system, tailored to the complex data structures of our rich cinema programme. We plan to release a version of the website to the public in the coming months.

All digital service redesigns should start with work to understand users and their needs. We kicked off with a design sprint to plan, sketch and develop BFI Southbank prototypes. These were designed for date-led browsing and booking and tested with new users, many unfamiliar with the BFI.

We complemented this with qualitative research interviews with frequent bookers who visit the venue more regularly, sometimes book further in advance, and tend to use a combination of online and print materials to find out what’s on.

We are also speaking in depth with users who have accessibility needs. So far, we have conducted interviews and contextual research with neurodiverse and deaf and hard-of-hearing cohorts.

The research insights from these groups – overlapping and distinct – have given us an invaluable foundation for design and development, and continue to lead the prioritisation and sequencing of work.

The BFI Southbank programme is uniquely rich, with over 100 different films and events presented in any given month. To make this complex offering simple for users, we are developing different ‘programme views’ – a curated view closer in feel to the printed BFI Southbank Guide for exploring the breadth of the programme, and a ‘full programme’ view for users who want to filter shows. Tools for quick date selection are a priority for both entry points.

We want to help users discover new and unfamiliar films and events, while making sure those who have a film and date in mind can book easily.

Design is being developed through ‘iterative possibility’ research sprints. We test prototypes with a small group of users, make changes based on feedback and repeat the process to help us refine the best approach.

We currently run separate websites for BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX. Our ambition is to make the two-venue offer easier for users to navigate. We are also keeping our video-on-demand service, BFI Player, in mind to test appetite for connections between programmes available in venues and at home.

The digital experience for What’s on is built on a new content management system (CMS) for programme content developed in Laravel.

As well as publishing and managing the content, we need to structure the programme data in ways that give us flexibility when presenting it to users.

We also want to make sure any new systems developed improve our internal workflows. Where possible, we are introducing automation to publishing processes and making use of existing data and content repositories.

BFI product and UX teams are working in two-week sprints. Development and design sprints are decoupled to increase agility, freedom of focus and productivity. But the parallel sprints are connected by intersections in the substance of the work and continuous collaboration.

Our hunch is that this is also improving the quality of work and decision-making: design isn’t being rushed to feed the development backlog; engineering and data structure decisions aren’t led by how an element needs to look on a page. We can be uncompromising in the right ways.

We are on track to release a private Beta of our ‘programme prototype’ in coming months. Users will be able to explore the programme through the new site, but not yet book tickets – the existing site will still be around for that. While we test this, we will be integrating the log in and booking journey and continuing to develop and implement the website’s visual design. Of course, user research and refinement will continue.

We’re hugely excited to start sharing this work more widely and, in time, to see new and existing users to benefit from it.