Critiq
I love movies. I hate how they are reviewed.
At what point did reviews become so wordy and confusing you need a dictionary just to understand them? It feels like critics are more concerned with showing off their vocabulary than giving the user something to digest.
Critiq is a social media based app that gives ordinary fans an outlet to share their reviews in a simple, easy to digest interface. It allows them to follow friends, publications and critics of their choosing and creates a more personalized feed. Think Twitter meets Rotten Tomatoes.
My Design Process
After designing different apps there's one thing that's critical for success: build a process. I create a method that's repeatable and measurable. It creates faster development cycle and allows you to test your ideas more often
Competitive audit and Research
Two competitors of this project are Rotten Tomatoes and Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Each provide a number of similar features for films including a synopsis, trailer, photos, cast, news articles, ratings and reviews. The main difference between each site is the respective rating system and both seem to have their flaws.
Rotten Tomatoes
Tomatometer - Percentage of certified critics who rated the movie a 6/10 or better.
Critic Average Rating - The average score of each certified critic's review from 1-10.
Audience Score - Percentage of users who registered an account with Rotten Tomatoes and rated the movie a 3.5/5 or higher.
Audience Average Rating - The average score for all registered users from 1-5.
Overall that's four ratings for each film and a lot of information to take in––especially for someone new to the site. Also, the ratings can be drastically different as is the case with Safe Haven (2013). What does a 53% difference between critic and audience score really tell a reader?
IMDb
IMDb has a single score for each film. All registered users can submit a rating – a number between one and ten – for any film on the website. These votes are then “weighted” so that certain demographics (newly-registered users, for example) don’t disproportionately influence the overall ranking of the film. How is the weighted average calculated? Well, we’re not exactly sure because their answer is quite vague:
IMDb publishes weighted vote averages rather than raw data averages. Various filters are applied to the raw data in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at vote stuffing by people more interested in changing the current rating of a movie than giving their true opinion of it. The exact methods we use will not be disclosed. This should ensure that the policy remains effective. The result is a more accurate vote average.
Although IMDb tries to correct skewed ratings based on their “weighted average system” it’s not always effective as in the case with Ghostbusters (2016). This movie received a score of 5.3 and was pulled down by 28,854 1 star votes, roughly 18%.
Discussion Guide and Interviews
I set out to learn how people determine which movies they watch. I was interested to see if people prefer to get feedback from friends or seek out professional critic's opinions. I was also interested in learning how people share their thoughts about movies after watching them and the manner in which they do it. I created a ten question discussion guide for interviews.
User Personas
After conducting each interview I created a number of user personas to help describe target users, painting a clear picture of how they’re likely to use Critiq, and what they’ll expect from it.
Michael
"The Movie Buff"
Age: 30
Accountant
Lives in New Jersey
Enjoys staying in on weekends and relaxing
Loves watching movies and averages approximately 5-7 movies per week. Goes to the theater about once a month.
Keeps a running list in iOS Notes app of which movies he wants to see. Follows the industry actively and is aware of what is out in theaters.
Hardly ever uses Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb. Enjoys a lot of movies that wouldn’t necessarily get good reviews from the critics, so he doesn’t really care what they have to say.
Doesn’t leave reviews on these sites because he doesn’t feel his opinion would be appreciated by random people.
Loves to discuss movies with friends casually. Enjoys dissecting a film and sharing his thoughts with friends who do the same and does this via group chat.
User Flowcharts
Next, after processing all the feedback from the interviews I mapped out user flows for a number of potential screens for the app. My goal was to create a simple interface that users are already familiar with.
Wireframes
I designed wireframes for a number of screens to layout the feel of the app. I started by sketching a chronological feed of followers where users can quickly like, comment or repost reviews. Next I designed a movie interface that provides details about each film and the options to rate, bookmark and watch a trailer. Then I created a bookmark page so the user can save movies they want to rate at their leisure.
Prototyping
I quickly realized the most challenging part of this project was creating a unique rating system that was intuitive and enjoyable. I started by sketching a number of different options to test with some participants I recruited. After reviewing the results I knew I had some changes to make.
iteration
The feedback I received from the prototyping session was that most users enjoyed the emoji based system as it helped convey how they felt after seeing a movie better than the alternatives above. They also felt it was unique and differentiated itself from other sites. However, some felt a little overwhelmed having five options and thought the face felt incomplete as is. Others thought it was a bit small and hard to read.
I took this feedback and improved upon my original design and after another prototyping session I had much better results.
What I learned
If you take a user somewhere make sure you can get them back to where they came from! I initially overlooked this important aspect and saw some users having trouble navigating to a previous screen. If you have overlay windows make sure it's clear to the user they can x out as well. I initially thought it was intuitive to click outside the overlay but this wasn't the case for everyone so I added an indicator to help facilitate.
