BookMyShow, one of the largest online ticketing platforms in India, has today announced the launch of its Progressive Web App (PWA) that offers an immersive app-like experience to the users right within the mobile browser.
The new design replicates BookMyapp app browsing experience. As per the company, it also reduces about 50 percent of the load time, thus bringing down data consumption to a minimum.
Anish Tripathi, VP-Product Design at BookMyShow says that the app is aimed at consumers in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities, who are mostly using low-end smartphone and often face poor network and connectivity. He added:
Most of our products are built on the basis of customer behaviour and insights. And it was these insights that got us to build the PWA. We realised that people were using the app and were happy with it, but their main concerns were data usage and the memory it consumes. And if they uninstalled the app and tried using the mobile browser, it didn’t work the same way. The only solution seemed to be to develop a PWA.
The team stated that the existing mobile website has now been successfully migrated to the Progressive Web App (PWA). The new and improved version is lighter, faster, and more user-friendly. The development comes fresh on the heels of Ola launching a PWA in collaboration with Google at I/O 2017 earlier this month.
On 2G networks, the initial load time is said to be 3.1 seconds, and even for personalised movie suggestions, the PWA is said to be taking less than two seconds in subsequent loads.
Ravdeep Chawla, product head at BMS said that since launch, the company has witnessed over 80% increase in its conversion rates and the revenue contribution of mobile web to BookMyShow’s topline has also increased dramatically.
The company has opted for a different design language. Anish explains that the idea was not to give two different mental models to the user but to retain the same features for different user behaviour.
Now, the company has moved its platform to a new language stack to accommodate the higher number of web pages on the official websit — BookMyShow. The code for the new PWA has been completely rewritten using React.
