Context

Watching movies is a pastime enjoyed by perhaps the majority of the world, and Letterboxd is the leading app for those who want to take their film love to the next level by tracking and reviewing the movies they watch, and hearing the opinions of cinephile peers. Its popularity skyrocketed in the past few years particularly within younger generations, and the app’s presence is felt across other social media platforms. It currently boasts of 13 million registered members.

The Problem

The app that is branded as “the social network for film lovers” has no direct way to share reviews and film opinions within the app. Inherent to appreciating moving art and film is the way it connects humans. Letterboxd demonstrates this by dedicating a section of its app to articles and reviews written by film critics and journalists.

I hypothesize that redirecting users to have private message conversations in the Letterboxd app will empower users to create more in depth conversations on films without getting sidetracked from sending content through other apps and even potentially increase the circulation of the long form reviews written by contributing journalists. 

Research: Why Direct Messaging?

I wanted to better understand the role of social communication and interactions in Letterboxd and by extension, habits on messaging on social media apps, particularly messaging content from one’s feed

Letterboxd and Leveraging Virality

Of course messaging is a ubiquitous feature across social media apps, but it was crucial to validate how desirable this feature would be when in the context of an app focused so specifically on movies. How might its function need to be more targeted to the ways that Letterboxd users would communicate with each other?

Zooming back out, I was first aware of Letterboxd’s prominence predominantly because of images of movie reviews from the app shared across social media platforms. If I could observe this on a public scale, I hypothesized this could be happening on an interpersonal scale, where friends were sharing entertaining movie reviews and movie recommendations to each other in messages outside of Letterboxd. 

This helped me get into the the headspace of wondering how a certain user would feel about a messaging feature, and how that would differ from the way a different user would want to use the messaging feature.

The Many Hats of Letterboxd

Learning how people used Letterboxd illuminated what would drive a successful solution. Social connection was an impactful variable – all participants downloaded it at the recommendation of peers, and many explained that seeing their friends share and review movies that they watched motivated them to stay on the app in order to stay in the know of their friend’s thoughts and interests. A surprising amount of people mentioned that they would like to feel a closer connection with their friends over movies. I was surprised to learn the extent to which viewing friends’ Letterboxd activity is an entry point for people to reach out to their friends. Some mention that they “enjoy seeing the Letterboxd reviews of friends, like to come across reviews” saying:

“There’s a big appeal to the somewhat organic discovery of thoughts and feelings”

New York Participant, 24

Nearly all the users reported sharing something they had seen on Letterboxd to a friend, and encouragingly, some users explicitly expressed a desire for a way to directly send reviews or movies to another Letterboxd friend within the app. Some users explained that the current method of sending content from Letterboxd somewhat deterred them from wanting to send it, one explicitly stating:

“(It) would be cool if you could send directly, like a DM feature”

New York Participant, 27

or that Letterboxd is a crucial tool in facilitating movie finds, but the tool is not quite refined.

“When people recommend movies to me, I have to pull up the app and add it to my watchlist, which sometimes feels like a lot of steps” 

New York Participant, 27

What I found most interesting was that Letterboxd’s public popularity – arguably a unique value proposition compared to its competitors – can become a pain point for some users, discouraging deeper film conversations in lieu of quick superficial interactions for maximum popularity. This specific problem space reinforced how an added feature could solve a need without sacrificing its strengths as a platform.

Ideating

Demonstrating Value in Solutions

User research helped me develop a user journey map to break down the steps for how they currently carry out the task of sending things from Letterboxd.

Comparing that journey to the proposed designs has helped illustrate not only the difference in ease the designs would create, but the reduction of interfaces used and the redirection of behavior to remain on the app.

Prototyping

Wireframing

Luckily, there are many pre-existing design patterns for messaging apps that are efficient and effective at sending content in a message. 

I tailored the messaging interface to the unique features of Letterboxd, like ‘adding to watchlist’ to make the journey easier and providing the ability to send blog articles within the app based on the specific audience of users and their unique reasons for being on an app for film lovers.

High Fidelity Mockups

Click on each screen to play

Testing

I recruited 5 people to conduct usability testing of the screens in order to validate that the tasks were understandable and easy to conduct. 3 of the users were unfamiliar with the app and 2 were current users of Letterboxd.
Every participant was able to complete the tasks after at least 2 attempts. The feedback provided gave direction to improve usability and align better with user expectations.

Revisions

1. Based on user feedback, I reformatted the content of the reviews so that it is distinct from the initial review format, as an added consideration. This thoughtfully condensed the information contained in the review as a living component and reprioritized the rating and the review of the movie closer to the top.

3. The next revision addressed the user’s desire to search in individual conversations in order to find recently shared content. My revision created another option for users to find content when they can recall the specific conversation where they received a review or recommendation. I also revised the original search results page to include content that is more relevant to media that a user would refer back to.

Closing Thoughts

I enjoyed being able to delve into an app that I love and use often. It was valuable for me to understand how it’s used by other people and how it stands out from its competitors. I can acknowledge that it would seem like a straightforward project to add a feature like direct messages to a social media app, but being able to research how the app is used compared to similar apps allowed me to implement features thoughtfully, supported by evidence of user behavior and sentiments specific to the typical behavior on the platform. Because of the research I was able to conduct prior to designing, I could think more deeply about the unique value proposition the design offers to Letterboxd as a brand and a service.

While designing, I appreciated how the constraints of implementing within an existing design system pushed me to closely examine the patterns and features of the interface. They became the toolbox from which I built my inspiration. This project has encouraged me to think about the optimization that comes from making small changes, and how it transforms the way we perceive products we love for the better.