"A mobile app for movie lovers to connect over shared interests, build watchlists, get premiere alerts, and take on fun movie challenges."

UX/UI Case Study

Overview

Problem: Movie enthusiasts who usually watch movies alone but want to connect to others need a way to make movie watching more of a social experience.

Role: UX/UI Designer

Timeline: October 2022 - January 2023

Tools: Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Google Forms, pen and paper

Process: I adopted the double-diamond strategy for designing The Movie Club in order to ideate from an objective point of view and to narrow my focus on finding solutions for clearly-defined problems.

Competitive Analysis

I began my research by investigating the marketplace for similar apps and services in order to understand both the user and the problem.

I tested many movie-related apps (Imdb, Movie Diary, Just Watch, Letterboxd), but only Letterboxd stood out as a true competitor, where users can leave reviews, add friends and create their own lists.

User Research: Survey

I started my user research with a survey to receive some general quantitative data to understand the needs of movie lovers. I got interesting new information from the 21 respondents.

Two-thirds of respondents said that they very often ask for movie recommendations from friends and family or browse movie forums for opinions. It seems they need to see reviews from real people, the official rating or even a received award is not enough to convince them.

User Research: Interviews

I started my user interviews with five participants who enjoyed the idea to make movie watching a social experience online. Some of them had past experience with creating movie challenges and sharing their personal lists and reviews with others.

To properly understand the users, I drafted interview questions with the goal of understanding their attitudes and behaviors, especially in regards to how they go about looking for movie inspirations, their feelings going through the process and any problems or concerns they have.

Following the interviews, I pulled quotes and opinions from the recordings for an infinity mapping exercise and sorted them as I uncovered patterns in thoughts and behaviors.

Key Interview Findings (pain points)

🔹 It’s difficult to organize movie nights for working adults because of the lack of time or a lockdown situation.

🔹 It would be great to get personalized movie recommendations based on favourites, lists, moods, categories or what friends watched.

🔹 It’s sometimes difficult to find people in their family/friend group with the same movie taste.

🔹 People tend to forget about movie premieres so they would like to set notifications for upcoming movies that they want to watch sometime.

🔹 Most people prefer reviews from other users to official ratings and awards.

User Personas

Synthesizing the survey data and insights from the interviews, I created two personas for the different user types I discovered: Evelin who’s main goal is to track releases and get recommendations and Mátyás who wants to find friends with similar movie taste and organize online movie nights.

User Journeys and Flows

I created user journeys based on the personas and their respective goals.

Low Fidelity Design

High Fidelity Design