How we turned the application loading screen into a useful tool for the user. Case of KION online cinema
How it all began
We, the online cinema team, are trying to gradually improve the application. The work is ongoing, and about a year ago we decided to optimize the launch: speed it up, add new features. So, previously, when clicking on the KION icon, the user saw a static picture, after which the application opened. An idea came to my mind: instead of just waiting, you can give the user something useful.
What exactly?
For example, speed up the launch, as mentioned above. To do this, we edited the code that is responsible for loading at the server-client interaction level. Everything was successful – after optimization, the application launch time was reduced to about 5 seconds.
In addition, we decided to make cool animations and show them during loading instead of a static screen.
Why her? There are three reasons:
A “live” image attracts the user’s attention, so the wait flies by. The subjective perception of time changes and the app appears to load faster. In fact, for both static and animation, the startup time is approximately the same.
It's simply beautiful, plus it creates a pleasant impression of the product before the user enters the application.
Replacing static with animated promos makes it possible to attractively highlight our best new products already at the launch stage.
Soon the fairy tale will tell, but not soon the deed will be done
The implementation of the idea voiced above is not such a trivial task as it might seem. After all, we didn’t just decide to replace a static picture with animation, it’s more complicated. The main thing is to present content that is relevant to the user in such a way that it does not irritate. All this needs to be technically implemented, tested many times, leaving only working mechanics, and only then rolled out to the entire online cinema audience or to more or less extensive segments of users.
The difficulty was not only in the selection of starting content, but also in the fact that the application runs on different software and hardware platforms, devices that are connected to the network through communication channels with different bandwidths.
Implementation highlights
We decided to store the content that is shown at launch on our CDN. When the application is loaded, certain settings are activated, so that it is possible to show different content to different categories of users. I note that not only the wow effect of the user is important, but also the convenience of content management, its establishment and promotion by the editors. For this purpose, a new CMS section was created with a set of filters for promotion. A team led by Sergey Gevorkyan was responsible for the development of the CMS.
To a first approximation, the experiment showed that users were satisfied. We learned this from the TVT (total view time) metric, but then we realized that showing the animation on loading is a critical first point of contact with the viewer. We began to conduct experiments: for example, showing our original content – KION Originals. So, when you launch the application, an animated screensaver opens, which offers certain content from the cinema itself.
We conducted A/B tests for a number of titles and got these results:
The screening of “Life on Call” at the launch increased the share of users who watched the film by 10.51%. In addition, such a metric as TVTu, the viewing time of unique users, improved by 14.31%.
For The Negotiator, the share of viewers who watched it increased by 30.97%, and TVTu – by 30.16%.
And for “Life on Call 2,” the share of users who watched the film increased by 1.987%.
The mechanics increase views of the titles shown, and traffic increases. More specifically, the growth is 10–30% depending on the proposed film, cartoon, etc.
It turned out to be quite working mechanics. It could already be put into operation. Then we decided to automate the uploading of content to the server, which is shown at the start of the application.
We created an admin panel, and provided access to it to the cinema’s editorial staff. Now, for each premiere, a certain set of files is loaded, which users see upon launch. The content is very different – from static graphics to videos, albeit with a limited set of codecs. We haven’t seen this with other online movie theater apps; usually it’s just an advertising banner.
Looking ahead, I will say that in the near future we plan to add personalization through ML recommendations. So far we have installed relatively simple filters. The criteria are as follows:
age of the viewer — if it does not correspond, for example, to the age label of a film, then the inappropriate content will not be shown to the user;
display frequency — made three promotional launches per user so as not to get boring;
no repetitions — if a person has already watched promoted content on our site, then at the start they will be offered something else.
I would also like to note that we moved away from associating our project with advertising. Initially, I wanted to implement all this as a unique launch with various features. For example, take recognizable content from a movie, a good shot of the main character, and show it to the user. We really didn’t want to end up making a regular banner spinner. It seems to me that everything worked out, although there is still some work to be done.
Development
Most of the plans have already been implemented. But, of course, there are several ideas that we want to implement in the near future:
content targeting: by time of year, holidays, user categories, etc. If it’s Christmas or New Year, then we show the corresponding animation;
targeting by third party events: for example, concerts, performances, etc., with the promotion of our and partner content.
All this is quite real: the mechanics we developed allow us to customize event content, not to mention its other categories.
That's all for me, I'm ready to answer questions in the comments.
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