Letterboxd is a dynamic social platform for film discovery, allowing users to explore a broad film library, log, rate, and review movies, and build personalized watchlists, all while connecting with passionate cinephiles. It serves as a popular hub for film enthusiasts to interact and share their love of cinema.

Key features include:

• Creating personal watchlists for future viewing.
• Maintaining a film diary of watched movies.
• Curating custom film lists.
• Writing detailed film reviews.
• Reading diverse articles and reviews from critics and users.

As a film enthusiast, I use Letterboxd almost every day and know its strengths and weaknesses like the back of my hand. My goal was to enhance the overall functionality, elevate the outdated user interface and improve the user experience.

With this redesign, I wanted to address the problems that I regularly encounter as an enthusiastic user myself.

Current pain points:

• The visually inefficient layout makes it difficult for users to switch between different sections of the app and often causes them to overlook important functions.
• The lack of a visual hierarchy leads to important information such as movie type, tags, details, sorting options, etc. being overlooked.
• The outdated user interface makes the app unattractive to users, so they don’t spend time with the app. 
• The lack of tags, especially for genres, puts the burden of decision making on the user instead of providing them with a set of the most searched options for a choice.
• It is difficult for users to quickly search for a movie based on specific criteria such as date, genre, etc.
• The most important functions of the app, such as activity (notifications), watchlist, diary, profile and lists, are hidden in a sidebar and therefore inaccessible.
• Although users can log ratings of the movies they like and even add some to the watch list, the current app does not show personalized movie recommendations for active (returning) users.

For the app redesign, I combined personal experience with extensive user research. I analyzed over 23.000 Play Store reviews and collected feedback from social media platforms to pinpoint common user frustrations. This comprehensive approach ensured my redesign effectively addressed the core user pain points.

Some of the most mentioned topics were:

• Absence of a bottom navbar to quickly switch between different sections of the app.
• The complex and confusing user flow that fuels user frustration.
• A lack of personalization and new features.

To address the identified design challenges, I initiated an iterative design process. This involved sketching multiple wireframes, user flow variations and prototyping several screen iterations. This approach allowed me to systematically explore potential solutions and refine the design until the most effective and user-centric outcome was achieved. 

A selection of screen iterations and wireframes:

After defining the user flow and information architecture, I focused on a detailed UI design process, ensuring every component contributed to a polished and engaging user experience.

Despite a robust database with millions of movies, the core functionalities of watchlist management and watch logging were hindered by inefficient user flows. Specifically, adding movies to the watchlist required excessive steps, forcing users to navigate to individual movie screens or manually search, rather than providing a direct bookmarking option from the home screen movie cards.

To streamline the activity tab, I combined the sub-sections into a single new “Notification” area, aiming for improved clarity and user comprehension. I removed the “You” section, which displayed the user’s personal activity log, as it duplicated information and detracted from the core notification/activity functionality.

To provide a more user-friendly and visually appealing presentation of watch history, I integrated a calendar view into the diary screen, showcasing movie posters in a photographic calendar format.

I optimized the filter modal’s interface for improved user-friendliness, making option selection more straightforward. Additionally, I introduced toggles within the list items to facilitate personalized filtering.

The movie details screen presented a significant design challenge, requiring extensive iteration on each component to establish a clear information hierarchy and create an engaging user experience. To ensure both familiarity and relevance, I researched popular online movie databases, balancing established patterns with the unique needs of Letterboxd users.

To improve efficiency and user flow, I integrated direct action buttons onto the movie screen for logging, liking, rating, and watch-listing, removing the need for the old modal interface.