Overview
Letterboxd is a social media platofrm for sharing your taste in film. This application allows users to track movies they have watched, save films to a watchlist, and write reviews and rate movies. As a movie lover and avid Letterboxd user, I decided to redesign this mobile application in Figma to be more intuitive and include more features that I think would be helpful, as a frequent user myself. Below is a side by side comparison of the existing application screens to the redesigned ones I have created using Figma, and then a deeper dive into the changes I made for each page along with reasoning for each page.
Final Redesign Prototype: here (Figma link)
Original Screens
Redesigned Screens
Home Page
The original "Home Page" that the Letterboxd app offers only includes movies that are popular. I redesigned this page to have all of your friends' activity on the home page, similar to Instagram or Twitter. I think the most important information that users, including myself, would want to see upon opening the app is recent activity from friends. This page that I created is very similar to the original "Activity Page" in the original application (symbolized by a lightning bolt), but the redesign has slight visual updates to provide a more sleek and aesthetically pleasing view. Overall, I think it would provide a much better user experience to have this new page as the first to pop up upon opening the app.
I also moved the plus (+) symbol to the top left corner of the screen rather than in the bottom task bar. Eye-tracking studies have shown that the top left corner of pages often get attention first, and I think this is important to keep in mind, as many users open the app to go to directly log a new movie. Therefore, putting this plus (+) icon, that symbolizes 'log a new movie', in the top left corner will allow for users to quickly and easily log a new movie after opening the app.
Original
Redesign
Discover Page
I decided to redesign the "Search Page" to be a "Discover Page", similar to Instagram. This new "Discover Page" still allows user to find films, reviews, lists, and people, but it also provides popular movies and reviews for the user to explore. The original “Search Page’ was wasting a lot of real estate and does not provide much to the user. The original "Home Page" had top movies, which I believed would be a good feature for this new page. I also added top reviews to this page, as I believe (as a user myself) it would be interesting to see the most liked reviews recently. The functionality of these pages would still work similarly to the original application. For example, upon clicking one of the movie posters, it would bring up a screen with the movie details, reviews, rating, etc. Additionally, upon clicking a review, users would be able to see the number of likes and comments on the review and click into the user's profile.
Original
Redesign
Chat Page
The third page of the application currently contains the "Activity Page". However, I believe this activity feed would be most beneficial as the "Home Page", as mentioned previously. Therefore, I believe that a chatting feature should be added as the third page in order to make the application more interactive, considering it is a form of social media after all. With this "Chat Page", users are able to have conversations with other Letterboxd users about films, reviews, etc. or send each other reviews or lists from other users. Adding this feature could also increase engagement, as users would be opening the app more to respond to messages.
Redesign
Original
Profile Page
The final page of the application is the "Profile Page". The application currently has little information on this page, with users needing to scroll down to see any information about the number of movies they have watched, followers, and following. I have redesigned this page to have more information present on the page without needed to scroll down. The page still includes favorite movies and recent activity, but it also includes the user's watchlist, number of movies watched, and number of followers / following. Additionally, the recent activity section of the "Profile Page" includes more information, such as the date logged and the review left (if applicable). Overall, I believe these edits allow for users to better understand their profile information at a quick glance than the original view does.
Original
Redesign
Conclusion
I believe that this exercise of redesigning one of my favorite mobile applications helped strengthen my skills in prototyping, design thinking, and other UX fundamentals. It was very good practice exemplifying user-centered design, considering I had created a prototype of a new design while keeping my own thoughts and preferences as a user in mind. I was driven to redesign this app, as I have found some of the application's pages and features to be confusing and not quite intuitive in addition to lacking aesthetic appeal. I feel as if I was able to make the social media much more user-friendly and satisfactory while keeping the overall color scheme and theme. If this redesign was implemented, I would be extremely satisfied as a user!