// 06 · Consumer · Social · 2016 — 2018
BookMyShow
Plan-it: bringing friends together, one movie at a time
// Overview
BookMyShow is India's leading e-commerce platform for movie and event tickets, and one of the most loved brands in the country — with a lot more value gained after the 2015 revamp.
When the product began looking at expansion, one direction was to experiment with chat and bank on the growing need to be socially connected. Plan-it was the first feature out: friends could share movies, discuss showtimes and book tickets without leaving the app. The primary goal was engagement.
// Problem & context
Group plans died in the gap between apps. Someone screenshotted showtimes, the group debated elsewhere, seats sold out, and the plan reset.
For BookMyShow, all that intent was invisible — and most of the group never signed in, so there was no way to bring them back.
// Process
// Shipping in increments
Plan-it was released in early 2016 at MVP level and kept growing with incremental features. What started as a basic chat that let users share movies from the keyboard was eventually stitched seamlessly into the rest of the product's pages.
Group plans died in the gap between apps.
// The hurdles
Stitching Plan-it into the product came with the risk of hampering existing flows. A bigger hurdle was a mandatory sign-up, which lost us some users and possibly kept whole groups off the platform.
The upside: we added 1 million sign-ups to the app — from which other products like BMS Wallet also benefited.
// Onboarding and the FOMO play
Once a healthy number of users showed interest, we leaned on their friends' profile pictures wherever possible — creating a sense of FOMO at a time when everyone wanted to be socially connected.
// Voting inside the chat
We used profile pictures for the voting feature too, which cut down the need to send multiple messages while adding a visual treat to the interface.
// Future concepts
Some of the strongest ideas never went live. These are the ones I still think about.
// Integration with WhatsApp
During the product cycle WhatsApp had taken over the market and was experimenting with businesses. Here's a concept for how BookMyShow could live inside it — still a possibility if WhatsApp ever adopts local apps the way WeChat does.
// Fantain Sports
In parallel I designed the first interfaces for Fantain, the group's fantasy-gaming platform, which grew to roughly 2M users.
// Outcomes
1 million new user sign-ups, benefiting BMS Wallet and the wider logged-in ecosystem.
A heavy influx of college students, who made the most group movie plans and weren't protective about another sign-up.
We eventually discontinued the product: we weren't fast enough to keep shipping features that held attention, a product inside a product is easily forgotten, and WhatsApp advanced hard over the same year we took to launch.
An adventurous ride with complex use cases — and a lasting lesson in speed, focus and retention for the team and for BookMyShow as a product.
// Next up