Building an app for a country crazy about cinema.

The official app of the Indian movie industry

Client

Flickbay

Industry

Cinema, Tech

Duration

1 Year

Role

Research, Product

The Project

I started with the usual preliminary study of how the tax filing industry operates. The biggest insight I found early on is that the motivation for paying taxes in the US is tax returns which is practically non-existent in India. In fact despite being home to a massive 1+ Billion people, only 1% of the Indian population pays taxes. In the United States, and in other countries where H&R Block has been massively popular, taxpayers pay taxes to get tax returns. And H&R Block specializes in maximizing the returns. And since the situation is completely different in India, we had to look into other options.

The Design Challenges

One of the USPs of working with the team was that they had an incredible amount of data & information about the Indian film industry. It was due to the fact that they were backed by one of the largest production houses. Organising the tonnes of ever growing news, pictures, trivia, videos, trailers, music, artists into clean, meaningful information architecture was a massive UX challenge. It took several weeks of work and dozens of sketches, wireframes to get to a point where the hierarchy was clear & functional.

UX Design & Wireframes

The next challenge was to convert the complex workflow into functional wireframes. This is when we convert the abundant data into meaningful information which a user can consume. Finding information should be effortless and hassle-free. We needed to keep the number of screens to a minimum, which meant designs dozens of wireframe variations with different features/functions clubbed together and test which ones work better than others.

Branding & Characters

The characters (by Beard Design) were used to give a character (how meta!) to the app. They were used to show the different genres, moods and emotions throughout the app as one of the experiments. They were able to bring life into However, we quickly realised that they were distracting from the actual content. Our attention shifted back into making the movie posters & images more interesting instead of relying on accessories.

View visual designs on Dribbble

Visual Design

Product Launch

Since Flickbay is backed by people inside the Indian film industry, the launch was massive as expected. Apart from a formal product launch in a press conference by Farhan Akhtar, the app was also supported by Indian cinema's biggest stars.