Redesign IMDb App — An UX case study
I decided to do this case study, after some discussion with my brother about an app to record the movies and series we watch and share our social activities about these contents. My brother suggested an app that looked great, but was extremely complex to use, which frustrated me a lot. So I had the idea of trying to solve this problem, with the creation of a case study of a supposedly perfect application for this problem, recording movies and series in a simple and useful way.
With that, I decided to survey 20 people who have the habit of recording films, to find out how and which applications they use to carry out this monitoring. I noticed that there was a wide variety of apps mentioned, in total there were 5 (IMDb; Letterboxd; TV Time; Filmow, and Traktv). Analyzing these results, I realized that when trying to create a new application, I would only be creating one more question for the consumer or one more application to be like another small fish in the ocean that our smartphones are.
I also did an analysis among these competitors, and I realized that IMDb stood out a lot, not only because it was a database created more than 30 years ago (it was created on Oct. 17, 1990). But for having this long history and already belonging to the giant Amazon, it ends up having a variety of features, an incredible number of 250 million unique monthly visitors, and 150 million downloads of the apps, in addition to some data that I will present later.
This all made it clear to me that instead of creating a new app, the most recommended thing for this case study would be to adapt the current IMDb app, so that it adds a content registration function with more freedom and allows you to be able to view the activities your friends’ profiles within the app.
With that, I’ve decided to do another survey with only IMDb users (11 participants) in order to understand how and why people use IMDb, my main insights were:
- 63,6% of users use IMDb more often on the phone through the app
- 72,7% of users told that the reason why they use was “Pick movies/series based on rates” and “ Browser through movies, series, cast & crew”
And my final question was “What else would you like to see added to IMDb currently?”
- 45,5% of users said “Option to mark content as watched (without rating required)”
- 36,4% of users said “Check friends’ activities”
- 27,3% of users said “Be able to view other users’ profile”
Based on these results I started sketching how I could adapt these new features in the existing app. Because I didn’t want to be too disruptive and do an extreme makeover. On the contrary, I think the application nowadays is good, and with that, I tried to make the most of the current design, and just add what was necessary to enable users to perform these tasks.
So I’ll explain the changes on each screen of the user flow while using the app, in order to create these new features and smoothly adapt them to the present version of the app.
Home
As mentioned before, I’ve tried to not be too disruptive which could cause confusion on daily users of the present app. With that being said, I will detail more about the changes I did to my proposal.
I’ve made the lower menu bar bigger in order to be more accessible and avoid misclicks. And also took away the Search button, because I had to add the Feed button, and 5 buttons could be too much and create more misclicks during the usage of the app. By making this decision I’ve had to create an even easier way to show how to search on the app, and my suggestion was to move the search bar up, which now is the first thing you see when you scan the screen. Other than that, I’ve just tried to make the screen cleaner and with less information, to make it easier to use.
Video
On the video screen, I’ve tried again to make the screen with less information and easier to use it. But also giving way more highlight to IMDb Originals Content, which is something that isn’t highlighted that much on the present version of the app, but is very important on their website.
Having the cover of each kind of their content makes it easier to understand which is which, and better for the new users who are not used to watching their original content or even didn’t know about their existence.
Profile
The profile screen is where the big changes started because I suggested for IMDb to use these profiles that they already have on their database as social profiles, where you could follow each others’ profiles and check their activity, lists, etc. I don’t mean to create one more social network, but more to just make it easier to check what are your friends or people you admire are watching, like it is just one more way to get recommendations from people that you admire. Also added a little stats below the name of the profile, which says how much time of watching do you have (e.g. 82 days, 3 hours, and 9 minutes of watching time).
Feed
As mentioned before, my goal wasn’t to make IMDb a new social network, I think we actually have enough of these. I’ve designed a simple feed where you could see your friends’ social activity, to basically check what they’ve been watching, and if your curiosity you can just click on the movie poster and go directly to the movie page. And if want to see your friends' profiles you can click on their photo and go to their page or just simply search it on the search bar, right above.
High fidelity prototype
Here is a quick video showing the usual flow to use these new features and how they would be adapted to the interface of the application.
Thanks for your attention and time!
Feel free to add feedback comments and connect with me.
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