Flickbay is an intelligent film discovery platform that allows you to consume and personalize film related content. It uses complex recommendation algorithms to understand user behavior in order to personalize content for each user and always keeps them engaged and entertained.

Flickbay, rightfully called the Bollywood’s official app, aggregates everything Bollywood & is backed by people from Excel Entertainment & Sony Entertainment India.

The Project

Flickbay was an amazing project to work on for two main reasons. One, it came straight from Bollywood! Two, it’s a classic example of when work is play. I’ve been a avid movie buff and this project had me literally work as an insider to the movie industry.

Flickbay already had a pilot MVP version which was seeing good traction & response. I worked with Flickbay reimagine the app from ground up with tons of findings from the MVP.  I was given complete control over the content, design & the feature roadmap.

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.

The number of interconnected parts were surprisingly difficult. For instance, a movie would have several artists, videos and news items, each artist would have several movies in his profile and may appear in several news items, each news item could have several movies and artists. And this is just the first level of complexity. Now each artist can be a part of a movie in different roles; that is, they can be a lead actor in one, singer in another and the director in a third movie. Mapping all this & present them in a logical flow was intimidating. In the next few weeks, we were able to come up with several different approaches & were ready to test them out. We let the data tell us what works best.

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.

Because of both the volume & complexity of information, there was always a risk of overwhelming the user. We had to make sure we minimise the risk as much as we could without actually removing features or critical information.

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 the otherwise static app.

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.

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.

Flickbay is Indian cinema’s largest database of profiles, news, latest updates, inside information, photos, movie releases, music & all things cinema. It’s been called ‘IMdB of Bollywood’, ‘Bollywood’s official app’, ‘go-to app for Indian cinema’ and much more. If you have a similar project and you’re looking for someone over a decade of experience to help you build it or make it 10x better, we should talk.

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