Cineworld

The Brief

Cineworld is the second largest cinema business in Europe. In 2013, Cineworld accounted for 51.5 million admissions and garnered revenues of over £406 million with an EBITDA of £72.3 million.

As a hybrid e-commerce / clicks and mortar company, a third of Cineworld's tickets are sold online but the product is delivered through its cinema locations. This means that Cineworld's websites are critical to the success of its overall business. The UK website (cineworld.co.uk) is phenomenally popular.

In order to retain its position as a popular UK website, cineworld.co.uk needed to have 99.7% availability, show up to date, relevant and accurate performance information and continually build on user experience. This meant making constant improvements to navigation, search, usability, offers and functionality.

The Cineworld web system is complex. New deployments are vital to maintaining the ongoing success of the site, but they also confer risk in terms of potentially unstable content uploads and content errors.

Our Approach

Cineworld engaged us to use our experience of e-commerce ecosystems to support its e-commerce team. The original project in 2012 involved the relaunch of the website with a complete overhaul of usability, search, payment and account management. Through a series of sprints in a highly agile development process, the new website was launched.

Test Partners worked closely with the developers, participating fully in sprints and ramping up test provision appropriately. Additionally, the decision was made to add an app for Android. The programme was completed on time and the new site was launched in November 2012.

From then on the site has maintained its position as a leading e-commerce site with a carefully planned release schedule of incremental improvements that considers and includes testing from the start.

The Result

“Test Partners has proved to be thorough and innovative in its approach to testing. The company demonstrated an awareness of practical considerations around usability and compatibility, yet at the same time provided a flexible approach that has enabled testing to contribute at every stage of the development process,” comments Regan Andrew, Head of Ecommerce, Cineworld Cinemas. “We’re delighted to have been able to develop such a long term and successful relationship that has helped us to maintain cineworld.co.uk as one of the most popular cinema websites in the world.”

View the Cineworld customer experience at www.cineworld.co.uk.