Pathé Cinémas
Challenge
How do you bring the magic of the big screen to life... in a mobile app?
Pathé Cinémas approached us to improve its digital ecosystem, app and website, with a clear objective: to offer an experience on a par with its premium cinemas.
In a context where streaming services are doubling their efforts to capture attention, we had to convince decision-makers to invest in an approach centered on emotional design.
A long-standing name in the 7ᵉ art, Pathé Cinémas is now the leading cinema exhibitor in Europe and Africa, with over 130 cinemas.
Since 2021, Source.paris has supported its digital teams on a dozen projects: redesign of the B2C site, customer area, booking and subscription path, industrialization of web production with Tailwind front-end architecture.
Approach
Our work focused on three main principles:
Immersion, with feed-style scrolling, large-format visuals and video integration.
Fluid navigation, using native iOS transitions and gestures (swipe to close, long press to rate a movie, etc.).
Signature moments, with carefully crafted animations on key stages such as booking confirmation.
Key solutions
Prototype the real experience, with a high-fidelity version that can be used directly on a smartphone, without any imposed scenario, taking advantage of iOS functionalities (accelerometer, pinch, long press, picture-in-picture...).
Pixel-perfect documentation, with a detailed guide for in-house teams and external providers, which also served as the basis for defining our own new documentation template.
Results
An immediate click on the customer side: the prototype quickly convinced Pathé executives to prioritize the integration of as many of the proposed principles as possible.
A change in strategic direction: the user experience is now seen as a premium image vector, on a par with cinema comfort and projection quality.
