This is topic AMC's New Web Design in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.


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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 12-02-2016, 08:00 AM:
 
AMC unveiled its new web design overnight (so all of your bookmarks are bad). It is gawdawful. Each feature is way too big, you can't quickly scan through what's at the theatre, scrolling is difficult and they insist on using a large block font to label movies "Digital" so it looks like that is the name of the movie.
Just an epic fail as far as site design and functionality goes.
Look up your local theatre and check it out: AMC Home
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 12-02-2016, 10:36 AM:
 
It's designed to look good on phones, the way all "modern" websites are.
 

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Posted by John Roddy (Member # 7348) on 12-02-2016, 11:56 AM:
 
That website would look awful on a smartphone. Just like all major websites that are designed to look good on a smartphone, actually…

What gets me the most is the quality of the image advertising their new redesign. At first, I thought it was some kind of scaling issue since I'm using a 4K monitor with a 200% scale (basically 1080p with a higher pixel density). But nope, that's just a bad-quality image. It looks like they tried blurring it in an attempt to be more artistical*, but it just looks stupid.

*Artistical: a word I just made up to describe the result of somebody doing something stupid and trying to justify it by saying it's "art" and we just "don't get it" or whatever.
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 12-02-2016, 12:02 PM:
 
Yeah, even worse on a phone. I checked after my first post.
It is really difficult to figure out what you are even ordering a ticket for when the have the tix for each feature broken up in to Digital, 3D and Big D and the title of the movie either isn't visible, or the next movies title is below.
I hope they paid a whole lot of money. And I hope they apply the design to Carmike's sites, replacing the bad but readable design Carmike has used the last few years.
 

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Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 12-02-2016, 12:34 PM:
 
AMC also just updated its Android app.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-02-2016, 12:37 PM:
 
Yeah, AMC's new web site looks like yet another Word Press template driven thing. The "responsive" behavior of so many modern web sites is rife with lots of unhappy accidents, like big type elements going right across the faces of people in background images. Oh, and those images can sometimes be cropped by their "responsive" view ports in some strange ways. But we can just use some creative filtering techniques on the pictures in Photoshop and throw up an obscure, expensive web font (Gordita in this case) to make the design "legit."

We will be stuck with this non-design shit where elements just fall where ever as long as people are viewing web pages on screens with many different sizes and shapes. If the design has to adapt to various square-ish and wide rectangular viewing shapes, both in portrait and landscape mode, then there just isn't any freaking composition at all. You can't properly compose a layout without picking a specific frame to hold the composition.

Aside from the tyranny of template themes, another complaint I have is deleted information. I had been checking AMC's site from time to time for things like an updated listing of Dolby Cinema locations. They removed all the "coming soon" locations from the page.
 

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Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 12-02-2016, 01:08 PM:
 
My initial test for a web site like this is "helps me to find the information that I need quickly and efficiently." This one completely fails.

For a movie theatre, I generally know what I want to see, so I need information about show times, pricing, and locations. This is what I set out to find for the AMC Loews Boston Common 19 (my local AMC). It would be good to also have information about the titles that are playing, including descriptions, running times, ratings, etc., but that is secondary.

First, the main page is rather slow to load.

Next, I clicked on "see a movie," hoping that it would take me to a list of theatres and showtimes. I, intead, got a list of movies with no indication of which ones are playing near me (since it had not asked for my location).

Picking "our theatres" and "find a theatre" took me to a listing of markets. I picked "Boston" and the page just reloaded. The same thing happened when I chose the "states" option and "Massachusetts - Boston" (at which point the header changed to "AMC Theatres in null").

No list of titles, no showtimes, no location, no nothing.

Presumably, they are still working out the bugs.

Does this even work at all for anyone? I am using Firefox on a desktop computer.
 

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Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 12-02-2016, 01:34 PM:
 
I'm using FireFox on a WIN 7 desktop, and the site worked correctly for me when I looked this morning. The fact that the design sucks is a different issue.

Like Scott, what I want to know is what films are playing at a given theatre, showtimes, and prices. While I was able to obtain this information, it was rather slow and clunky to do so.
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 12-02-2016, 01:42 PM:
 
All this makes me think I should just stick with my old fashioned plain-jane non responsive website (that is perfectly readable on a phone).
 

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 12-02-2016, 02:35 PM:
 
I agree with you, Mike. People come to my website (and yours) to get information, not to watch dancing penguins on the head of numerous pins.
 

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Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 12-02-2016, 09:31 PM:
 
GOD DAMNIT

It should just let me click on a particular theater and then show me a LIST of movies and showtimes.

It was awful before and just as bad or worse now. The website is just a bunch of movie posters. I have to go out of my way to be able to find a particular theater, at which point I am greeted with MORE posters and NO showtimes. Flawless. I have to THEN click on a movie(That lists a format they don't even have anymore[ETX]) to get showtimes for JUST that movie, rather than being able to compare all the times to be able to plan a double feature or when I want to leave vs when a few movies I want to see start. So I'd have to go back and forth, AND THEN scroll across each time, and write shit down, and just GUESS what format a particular movie is in until I click on it.

This is just going to further add to the "But your website said!!" "No, you had a theater in Alabama's showtimes selected"

JUST SHOW A FUCKING LIST!

I can say with confidence and all seriousness that the difficulty of getting showtimes from AMC(website AND app) regularly looses them business from me. It's too much work.
 

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Posted by Rex Oliver (Member # 7593) on 12-03-2016, 01:34 AM:
 
I tried to look up AMC theaters in my area-----Site was still searching half hour later-----USELESS!!!!!!And they call that an "improved" site?Try again guys!
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 12-03-2016, 10:40 AM:
 
I tried clicking on the link for the Disney Springs 24 (which used to be called the Pleasure Island 24) at Disney World, and got a "404 not found" error. Try again guys, indeed!

Update: I just got the Disney 24 to come up. I looked up "Moana," and the listing contains this very well-worded phrase:

Adults 18 and Over Unless Accompanied By Guardian

also:

No Red or Green Tickets

which I have no clue what THAT means.

Great work, AMC! From what I can see, this site seems to work infinitely better on a computer than it ever would on a phone.
 

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Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 12-03-2016, 11:08 AM:
 
The show times work for me now, but the site is still very slow. Also, the type is so large and everything is so spaced out that a significant amount of scrolling is needed in order to view the complete list of titles and show times. Ugh.
 

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Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 12-04-2016, 03:30 PM:
 
I played around with the site on my iPad and, uh, it worked fine and was laid out nicely on the screen.

I searched by theatre, chose the Omaha market, and AMC Council Bluffs 17. Scrolled the movies and selected a showtime. The seating chart popped up instantly. Selected a seat and got the ticket type page (where you select regular, child, or senior rates). Taken to purchase page. Everything worked instantly with no latency except the purchase page, which took about three seconds to load.

And my old direct link to this theatre's page DID still work. But it went to a summary page for this theatre. I had to click Showtimes, and that gave me Council Bluffs' showtimes.

On the iPad, if you look at it in Portrait mode, it shows the movie titles and showtimes. If you move to landscape mode, it adds a fixed cell to the right with a summary of whatever feature you have centered in your scroll. The feature auto-changes as you scroll.

Buck, to get to the Showtimes scroll for a theatre from the Market list, select the blue "Showtimes" under the theatre address. If you click the theatre name and get the summary oage, cluck "Showtimes" at the top right of the page,
 

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 12-04-2016, 04:21 PM:
 
When you need someone to post an actual set of detailed instructions for how to get the information you want from a web page, that's a perfect demonstration of the problem with a setup like this.

Front page: Pick a theatre.
Next page: Here's a list of what's playing, choose the showtime you want.

That should be all of the instruction needed, really.
 

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Posted by James Wyrembelski (Member # 9037) on 12-04-2016, 04:27 PM:
 
Reminds me of when they switched over to the new Windows.

I remember getting this new computer and when all of the tablet like buttons popped up and it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to even find my calculator, I about threw it in the trash.

4 years later I still have issues even trying to print documents when it loads them into some weird viewing program. There's no print button??? WHY?
 

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Posted by Harold Hallikainen (Member # 5405) on 12-04-2016, 04:37 PM:
 
Welcome to the paperless office! No print button required.
 

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Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 12-04-2016, 04:38 PM:
 
It sounds like the web designer AMC hired is an iNerd and thinks everyone will be using an iPad to view the website.

It was pretty awful for me here on a real computer with Windows 7 OS...and that's even with two 30" screens.
 

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Posted by Buck Wilson (Member # 5885) on 12-04-2016, 05:07 PM:
 
Ahh, ok, that works better.

And I will say, I love the new app. That's what I'll use, for sure.
 

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Posted by Rex Oliver (Member # 7593) on 12-05-2016, 01:29 AM:
 
No print buttons??You have to be even more low tech for the solution---a pencil and paper!
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-05-2016, 10:21 AM:
 
Oh well, there's always the Google listings for movie showtimes when doing a basic web search. But that only helps if you're going to buy your tickets at the box office and not in advance.
 

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Posted by John Roddy (Member # 7348) on 12-05-2016, 01:19 PM:
 
So many companies have adopted the "less is more" approach to interface design. It's not a bad concept overall, but it's ripe for abuse and very easy to screw up. The most common failure? Take the approach literally. Remove stuff until there's less, then blow up the size of what remains to fill in the gaps. They have the right idea at first, but seem to fall short on the "is more" part, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Anyone remember the Zune software? Actually, anything related to the interface on the Zune applies. Microsoft's original approach, "metro," was really an amazing thing to behold. But it only worked because they didn't remove the actual content, only the chrome elements containing it. The content itself became the chrome. That is the proper way to do it. The information isn't just still there, it's presented in a clearer, much more intuitive fashion. They did so many things right with that design philosophy, and then proceeded to follow up on it with…Windows 8. See first paragraph.

So yeah, AMC turned into Windows 8. The whole tablet-oriented discussion around this new site does not help with that point either.
 

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Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 12-05-2016, 04:53 PM:
 
I've now played with the site on an iPhone and...yeah, no
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 12-05-2016, 05:36 PM:
 
And while we're trashing AMC's WebSite, what the hell is this about:

quote:

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IMAX I LOVE MOVIES, IMAX MOVIES

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quote: Bobby Henderson

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I had been checking AMC's site from time to time for things like an updated listing of Dolby Cinema locations. They removed all the "coming soon" locations from the page.

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