Reimagining the digital experience for Palace Cinemas
Palace Cinemas is one of Australia’s leading independent cinema groups, operating more than 20 locations nationwide and hosting multiple major film festivals annually.
Client
Palace Cinemas
Services
Platform architecture & strategy
Custom web development
UX/UI design
System integration (Vista & CMS)
Industry
Cinema & Film
Project Start
2017
The founders of Pipelabs have been working with Palace Cinemas since before Pipelabs was established, a long standing relationship that gives us a deep understanding of their digital ecosystem, which Pipelabs has helped evolve significantly over time.
The Challenge
For the latest web platform redevelopment, we agreed that further evolution was required to both freshen the platform and take advantage of many new opportunities - creating a digital experience capable of supporting complex ticketing, memberships and loyalty, film festivals, and mobile commerce experiences, while remaining intuitive and accessible for a broad audience, including older demographics. The challenge was in taking the current platform, which was well trafficked, usable and effective (but aging after 6 years in operation) and re-crafting it not only to provide an overall better user experience but a world-class cinema site and Festivals platform.
Pipelabs had recently re-developed the Palace MemberHub to improve speed, add new features and build a world class mobile user experience, which includes features like QR codes for downloading tickets and adding them to Apple and Google wallets, viewing and managing member tickets and rewards, a reward points scheme and more - this experience was applied to the full platform
The challenge was in both maintaining the effective existing experience while modernising UX site-wide, gift cards, membership and loyalty functionality, along with location-based and other services. The architecture had to support cinemas nationally, and allow Palace to adapt quickly to seasonal campaigns, film releases, and festival requirements. New content management systems and integrations were added to support effective and easy administration.
Our Approach
Pipelabs approach included delivering a range of custom- built capabilities to support integration, user experience and scalability. A key component of this was an integration with the Vista ticketing system, redesigning the Member Hub experience which includes digital membership cards and an enhanced rewards system aimed to improve customer engagement.
In addition, Pipelabs improved access to the cinemas booking history, downloadable tickets, gift card purchasing, the ticket refunding function and created a more user friendly experience for customers.
Other custom builds include an on site shop for items like wine glasses and festival DVDs, a redemption portal for refunding tickets and a system for gift card purchases. Pipelabs also rebuilt the loyalty system to improve performance and UX, and managed other features and a CMS, enabling their team to easily manage and update frontend elements such as image sizing and other content configurations.
The partnership with Palace Cinemas is highly collaborative, with Pipelabs functioning almost as an extension of the Palace digital team.
The outcome
The Palace Cinemas platform demonstrates Pipelabs’ ability to deliver large scale, highly customised digital platforms, combining commerce, ticketing, membership, and operational systems into a seamless customer experience.
The result includes a unified customer and operational system across the business, improved member engagement and loyalty experiences, enhancing ticket purchasing experience, improving operational efficiency across the cinemas and launching a new IOS app. Maintaining a close partnership, Pipelabs have a strong ongoing roadmap with approximately 18 months of future work planned.
The modernised digital ecosystem now supports continued innovation and growth across Palace Cinemas’ network. The platform continues to evolve as Palace expands digital capabilities.
