Movieseer

[LancasterBFC]

The movieseer film listing website has been rendered unusable by possibly the worst redesign since someone decided the Titanic could get by with fewer lifeboats

Anyone know of a decent alternative (or have the ear of the site's owners, to tell them to go back to plan A?)

[Hssl]

see what you mean, PITA is navigate

[elibangkok]

I agree, I used to love this site but it is now unusable.

I would try majorcineplex.com if the theater is a major or egv theater.

I think sf cinema has a website too.

[TheLaughingMan]

Whats wrong with the new movieseer? I used it tonight and it was ok.

[surface]

I remember seeing quite a few developer positions on the jobs page a few months ago and being somewhat excited that they were putting more resources into the site. I never imagined this would be the result. Apparently they decide to make the site more "Thai" by adding a lot of flash, making what should be drop down menus into pop-up windows of sort, and completely ignoring the UI and IA processes. For whatever reason Thai's have decided that Google is wrong and sanook.com and the like are right. At best I'd say the new site UI was designed by some pretty junior developer or "Thai style" graphic designer. I now just go straight to majorcineplex.com, which is a nightmare itself, but less so than movieseer at this point.

[movieseer]

Hi All,

Thanks for your comments about the new MovieSeer redesign of the site. Although we cannot please everyone with the new style we have spent a lot of time and energy with regards to the new UI and design of MovieSeer. As the site has not been updated since 2001, we decided it was indeed time for a complete overhaul of the site. Much of this had to do with redoing the backend and coding so that the site would perform better, faster and provide new services for advanced users. With the change we decided to use a more image focus as what you might find at Yahoo vs. pure text and data at imbd. Our believe is that movies are a visual and auditory experience and we wanted to have the similar experience translated on the web site by using larger images, videos and a more interactive experience to the user.

I am curious to find out why the new design is now "unusable" as we have had a large number of users both Thai and Western say they like the new design and layout. In addition, I like your assumption that this design was created by "junior developer or Thai style graphic designer". Yes we do have Thai designers as we are based in Thailand and I think Thai graphic designers are some of the best in Asia for cost vs. quality. In addition, we also brought in a Senior User Experience Design Strategist Consultant from the US to give us feedback and comments on the site design and UI. As we are still tweaking site some feature will be changed and some added over the next few months. Therefore if you have any comments or suggestion feel free to send us an email at: [email protected] as we are happy to hear any feedback you might have and suggestions on how we can improve our site.

With best regards

Roy D. Chapin IV

CEO

MovieSeer Limited

9th Floor 1016 Sri-Fueng-Fung Bld.,

Rama IV Road, Silom

Bangrak, Bangkok 10500 Thailand

Edited July 4, 2009 by movieseer

[robblok]

I never heard of the site before and i went to take a look. The site could be nice if it was not so incredibly slow. Its the SLOWEST site i have ever seen and im using a good connection and visit a lot of sites in Holland and the US.

Also get errors when i ask for more information on a movie.

Edited July 4, 2009 by robblok

[webfact]

Can report from my location it opens FAST! Very fast indeed. Faster than some well known message boards...

I am on 2MB sme in BKK

[robblok]

Can report from my location it opens FAST! Very fast indeed. Faster than some well known message boards...

I am on 2MB sme in BKK

Real strange.. at the moment i have no problem with my connection. Have you tried selecting movies and so on ?. I even had to wait for ages before i could switch the language.

p.s an adblocker does wonders in speeding up certain message boards.

[webfact]

The movieseer film listing website has been rendered unusable by possibly the worst redesign since someone decided the Titanic could get by with fewer lifeboats

Anyone know of a decent alternative (or have the ear of the site's owners, to tell them to go back to plan A?)

Hope I am allowed a small remark. As a designer (not web) I can't agree that this site design is that bad!

[robblok]

The movieseer film listing website has been rendered unusable by possibly the worst redesign since someone decided the Titanic could get by with fewer lifeboats

Anyone know of a decent alternative (or have the ear of the site's owners, to tell them to go back to plan A?)

Hope I am allowed a small remark. As a designer (not web) I can't agree that this site design is that bad!

I dont have a problem with the design either. Just the speed, but it seems a lil better now although i still get error pages from time to time.

[movieseer]

We currently are working on the speed issues and hopefully these will be resolved by next week.

[jeffer]

Doesn't display well in places using Opera but that's the price you pay sometimes for using one of the minor browsers. What does work works well and certainly no speed issues using Opera, faster than Thai Visa, actually very fast. There are many Thai sites that are truly bad but this isn't one of them.

Just tried it using IE and a big improvement. 6/10 using Opera, 8.5/10 with IE, very, very fast. Maybe an update for Flash is needed for some users?

[webfact]

We currently are working on the speed issues and hopefully these will be resolved by next week.

Visited that site for a 3rd time and must say its pretty good! Its easy to navigate too.

A big thumbs up for the fact that English language seems to work throughout the entire site.

[surface]

Hi Roy. It was late so I was probably a bit harsh on the site. My comment about "thai style" graphic designer was in regards to the sites UI, but it was worded badly. I have nothing against Thai graphic designers, I had some good work done here myself.

Gave it another go just now and noticed a couple of things using Firefox 3.5

1. Within Showtimes, the left Movie Finder and Movie Showtimes areas combined into a single query. Causes a bit of confusion if you had originally selected one theater group in the Movie Finder for the first query, then a different theater (or a theater from a different group?) in Movie Showtimes for the second query. In this case it displays no results. You must manually clear one of the search areas to get expected (or any) results.

2. What is the box for underneath Movie By Location? It appears to search for theater name but isn't labeled and behaves differently depending on if you type something and click search or type something and press the enter key. Out of curiosity I just checked with IE and pressing the enter key didn't do anything... can't really figure out what the intended function is here.

I think the design is actually pretty nice, now that I figured out it's the behavior of the elements that was throwing me off when i was in a hurry.

Edited July 4, 2009 by surface

[LancasterBFC]

Hello Roy, since I started the thread I'd better pitch in with some comments;

As others have mentioned, the site is glacially slow, a problem exentuated by the constant flickering of the big 'hot movies' box in the middle and the ever-present video box below.

The basic movie showtimes is much harder to navigate than it was before. There are an array of options, but who needs 'em? You just want to see what's on at the movie theatre you're going to or search for a particular film by time. I often find that when I open the 'box' for a particular cinema it will start closing and opening quickly - too quickly to actually see anything. There is no longer a list of movies that are on (somewhere) so you can see if there's anything unusual on you can go and see.

Perhaps my biggest gripe is the way the Coming Attractions section now works. For me, it's been rendered unusable. For a start, according to your sight there's nothing opening between now and July9 - which I doubt . But this section used to be a fairly straightforward list of films opening with the dates next to them. It was 'at a glance' so you didn't need to go flicking through page after page. You thought 'right, I really want to see -say - Slumdog Millionaire' - when is it on and looked down the list. Now I'm prepared to believe that some people think 'right, I really must go to the flicks in the week beginning November 23, let's see what's opening' but I don't think that's the typical reaction.

Can I respectfully suggest that you have a very simple, and very good, business model. You provide valuable information. That's it. Anything else is just window dressing. If you've got resources, put it into making sure you've got the widest possible range of information. Design should be about simplicity, which is what you had before. Sometimes in design, less is more - and this is a classic example.

[Sophon]

I have a few major gripes about the new site:

It is extremely slow. I am on a normal Edge connection, and each page takes between one and two minutes to load. I seems to me that the focus in redesigning the site has been too much on looks and not enough on making it work on all kinds of connections. The old site worked fine on an Edge connection.

The functionality on the site has (for my taste) too much focus on theatre groups and too little on location. I don't give a hoot about whether I watch a movie in a EGV or Major Cineplex theatre, so that is completely irrelevant information to me and makes getting a quick overview more difficult. Bangkok is a very large city with many theathers of which only three or four are convenient to where I live, but there are no way (that I have found) to narrow the search beyond "Bangkok". That means that I have a choice of going through a long list of theaters to find the ones relevant to me, or to choose the three or four theaters I go to one by one. And with the speed (or lack of) of the site the latter option is not very attractive. What I could really use is functionality that allow me to choose my "favourite" movie theaters and for the site to be able to use those as a search parameter. Of course, the site should remember my favourites the next time I visit.

And as mentioned before by others it's not at all clear that the two search boxes "movie finder" and "movie showtimes" work in unison. Since they are divided into two separate boxes the immediate reaction is that they are two separate search functions. To me the "movie finder" search criteria (apart from location) are totally irrelevant. I doubt that many people are searching for movies based on star rating or whether the movie has received awards. "Movie by genre" could in theory have some value, but in practice I would never use it for fear of a movie being mislabelled. A movie like the new Star Trek movie could be labelled both as "Action", "Adventure", "Fantasy" or "Sci-fi" so which would you choose. And it's not like there are that many movies playing at the same time that you really need this functionality.

A tip to Lancaster. It's true that there is no longer a list of movies that are playing like there were on the old site. But if you click on the "Select movies" drop down under "Movie showtimes" you will get a list of the movies that are currently playing.

I don't find the functionality of the new site very logical but given time (when you find out how everything works) I am sure I will be able to live with the new site as long as the speed improves - as it is now it's unusable on slow connections. But as has also been mentioned before the new site doesn't give me anything the old site didn't, all that have been added are windowdressing which is no doubt also why it's so slow now.

Sophon

Edited July 4, 2009 by Sophon

[WeeGB]

Can I just say well done to Movieseer, for actually taking the time to reply, and address the concerns here.

That's how to run a business.

UBC/True please take note.

[girlx]

we also brought in a Senior User Experience Design Strategist Consultant from the US to give us feedback and comments on the site design and UI

i don't think the site is really all that bad (though i am no longer in thailand so have not used it much beyond a cursory inspection because of this thread), but as an american (senior) user experience designer, i highly doubt the above quoted line.

[DP25]

Movieseer seems fine to me. At least it doesn't fall victim to the most annoying aspects I find on Thai websites, LOUD unneeded music and sound effects, coupled with difficult navigation in the form of animated menus.

Now the new KFC website, that's a bad redesign. They don't appear to even have the phone number for delivery on the website, I ended up ordering from another restaurant solely because I didn't know what number to dial. You'd think that would be the most important information on site, and that it would be on every page and very easy to find.

[Lost in LOS]

Great that movieseerer responds. a couple of small things.

1. it would be nice if we could save it to open in English each time if that is not hard. not too much of a problem finding the english button but it would be nice to have it in english when it opens each time

2. since pattaya is such a large city it would be nice to have that in the drop down instead of part of chonburi. Just the 3 movie chains would make it easier to find which movie theater we want

there was something else and i will update this is i remember it.

this site opens quickly for me and the site looks great. the updated site for major is terrible to navigate and now i use this instead

[huyuli]

Hi Roy

There was nothing wrong with the old one and you did not need to change it. The new one does not look as good but I could put up with it if it worked as well as the old one. What's wrong? Click on "English", nothing happens. Click on the movie name, nothing happens.

[ironhut]

I like the new design.

However, I have on more than one occasion noticed that theaters were missing from the information (spec. Chaengwatthana Central SFX). I haven't checked in a couple of weeks and hoping that this has been rectified.

Thanks for caring as it is a very nice resource.