Something that’s always bothered me about Fandango’s showtime User Interface is the design choice to show available showtimes in red text. Usually, when we want to indicate that something is available, we’d use green as a visual cue.

Red is most commonly associated with things like:

• Stop
• Delete
• Unavailable

Maybe the UI team at Fandango had a good reason to do this (or perhaps internal testing bears out that this somehow improves conversion rates for ticket purchases), but anything that causes the user to hesitate or have to think for even a few more seconds should be reevaluated. This, of course, was the point of Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think“.

In my simple mockover, I’ve changed the available showtimes to bold green and removed the showtimes that are no longer available (why were they shown in the first place?) I’ve also increased the size of the “Tickets” badge to draw more attention to the showtimes as the main call to action.

This is total “Monday Morning” armchair User Interface Design, and as I mentioned before, the Fandango team might have data to prove me otherwise. But my instinct is that my mockover design represents a more intuitive user experience.