Project origins
Ending the
indecision
Finding a movie or tv-show to watch can be difficult, especially when we are in a group. PickaFilm is a mobile app that makes this task much easier by allowing members to veto the genres they don't feel like watching today, prioritize the ones they are most in the mood for, and add multiple search filters that will allow them to find the right solution.
Pickafilm is the result of a project carried out by my colleague Manuel Gómez and me, to get started in the world of native mobile application development. Find out more about how the idea came about below.
Initial situation
At the beginning of 2019, my partner Manuel Gómez and I started a project to learn about native mobile app development and thus expand our technical knowledge in the field of software product development. We were looking for an idea for an app, which my partner would develop for Android, while I would carry out the development for iOS devices.
After a few weeks of interviewing and researching possible needs that we could solve with a mobile application, the solution came to us through a relative: this person mentioned the difficulty in finding a movie to watch, especially when she was with friends. On many occasions, the group ended up spending half of the time they planned to watch the movie looking for options, often Googling for options in circles, in a chaotic way, and without a clear objective.
We found this issue interesting because, even though we could find numerous solutions on the market that aimed to solve it, our conversation seemed to indicate that the challenge was still there. With this, we decided that our first native mobile application would have as its goal to solve this widespread problem.
Design Challenge
Reaching
consensus
fast and conflict-free
Interestingly enough, not finding titles that fit the preferences of the group is not the biggest obstacle when choosing which content to watch.
Instead, the biggest challenge for users is to understand and be able to clearly define their own preferences.
Pickafilm helps all members of the group to ask themselves the right questions right from the start regarding what they are looking for. Thanks to a careful survey and filter design, users are clear about which options they must check in order to find the suggestions that best fit the group.
Filters design
Most movie search solutions overwhelm their users with filters that are too specific and restrictive — for example: search exclusively for comedies, with a specific cast, etc. Users often feel uncomfortable closing their possibilities to a specific genre and don't know what to indicate.
For this reason, PickaFilm proposes filters that adapt to the way humans think and communicate: asking the members of the group how they feel about a certain genre or movie property — for, against, or indifferent. Users can reply to these questions by swiping right on the genres and movie features they want to prioritize, swiping left on those they want to veto, and leave untouched those aspects they don't care about. The results will take into account all these preferences.
Of course, if members are clear that you are looking for something specific, they can also apply a set of advanced filters.
Personalized
results
Pickafilm knows that looking for titles to watch for an evening with the family is not the same as doing so for a meetup with friends, or to enjoy alone. For this reason, it offers different search modes: Just me, Friends, Family, and Guest.
Each mode applies a layer of smart filters on top of the user's explicit choices. This way, when the user selects "Only me", the app will use recommendation algorithms based on previously watched content, to prioritize options that share features with the movies they liked before, leave out the movies they marked as uninteresting, and leave for the end titles they've already seen and those with similarities to the uninteresting ones.
The recommendation algorithm gets more precise as the user keeps using the app, but in order for it to work from the first use, the Pickafilm asks new users to indicate five titles they love and five they dislike, as soon as it gets installed.
Smart filters
PickaFilm offers four viewing modes — Just Me, Friends, Family, and Guest —, each with a different way of filtering and sorting the results:
The Just me mode is the most personal of them all. Since the user is going to watch the movie or show alone, PickaFilm will try to make the best suggestions for them by not only considering titles marked as uninteresting, but also taking into account previously chosen ones, identifying different patterns and tags, and suggesting related content.
Similarly to the Just Me mode, the Friends mode takes into account movies and shows that the user has marked as uninteresting, but does not apply any additional filters. This way, when the user is deciding which movie or show to watch in a group, they will already have banned some titles that they do not want to see beforehand.
The Family mode provides filters so that all members of a group, regardless of their age, can enjoy the suggested titles. It also filters out movies and shows the user marked as uninteresting, just like the Friends mode.
The Guest mode gives the most freedom to the user since it does not apply any smart filter: titles previously marked as uninteresting will reappear. This is ideal if someone who is not the main user is using the application.
Connection with
streaming services
PickaFilm informs users about the suggestions' availability on the streaming services to which they are subscribed, and offers them the possibility to quickly access them with just a tap. To do this, the application uses web-scraping techniques — either by accessing information that these platforms publicly share, or by providing exclusive subscriber information as long as the user is logged in on the service through the app.
Links
of interest
You can download the app for iOS, watchOS, and iPadOS by accessing its Apple App Store page.
You can also download the Android version — developed by Manuel Gómez — through the official website.