Every few days, when my wife and I are picking something to watch, we end up scrolling through Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, whatever else there is for what seems like two hours. Back and forth between platforms trying to pick a movie that matches our tastes. There are some days where we've watched three whole episodes of Seinfeld just trying to decide on something else to see.
Why is picking something to watch so hard? So much choice across platforms should make it easier to pick in theory, but in practice, we end up spending most of our time just scrolling through each platform to see what’s available.
What is the gap in tools for picking something to watch? I conducted a preliminary competitive audit to evaluate competitors in the space, websites like Letterboxd, Likewise, and Justwatch. These add social components to the process, but in practice, you end up scrolling through a ton of content the same way that you would on the streaming platforms themselves.
I conducted interviews with a few friends about how they pick something to watch. Across the board, a common theme was that the recommendations you trust the most, come from your friends. And ultimately, there isn’t really a product that delivers a cohesive and clear experience to explore media through these recommendations.
I began with the idea that people may like to create curated “self-expression boards” or “stuffboards”. Akin to Facebook’s Like pages, I began by thinking of how a page like this could look, as a way to mark what you like on the internet. This feature was popular on Facebook, but it wasn’t particularly appealing or well-designed, especially since it wasn’t a core functionality of Facebook.
I drafted the look using Adobe XD and used this iteration as a launchpad to develop the aesthetic I had in mind.
This first draft was an attempt to be as minimal as possible, and allow the creation of curated boards of interests, but it quickly became apparent that minimalism for the sake of minimalism can just be an absence of functionality. Additionally, there wasn’t yet a clarity about the organization or functionality of the app.
I studied different designs to find a look and a feel for the overall user interface, which I would build and test the functionality experience on top of. Eventually, I landed on a hierarchy based on a more greyscale interface, so that the “curated” content would stand out against the more clean, minimalistic backdrop.
In the next phase, as I designed the Discover page, which as I developed the information architecture, it struck me that the functionality I was imagining could be the heart of the product itself. Especially considering the “why” story that led to the initial ideation.
Before continuing with the design, I sketched out a preliminary idea for the structure of a database for an application like this and used it to envision what a UX supporting this would look like.
Finally, I landed on a design that matched the intended experience for the central function of the app which is Discovery. This project is still in progress, but the next steps are to create a functional prototype which can be used to test the product with new users and iterate and refine the concept.
If this can be developed into a working and meaningfully helpful product, there are a slew of use cases and options for monetization. Both from the perspective of being a business and being a tool that customers could love to use, it may present interesting integrations with existing media companies to help boost their own platforms.
If it works in any one of these areas, it could potentially be expanded beyond media to restaurants, businesses, software, anything else that is helped by social recommendations. Users could in theory have “identity stacks” or “boards” that allow them to share the products and services that they use and like.
