IMDb Redesign
A strategic re-design of the popular movie information site IMDb, based on intensive research and issue profiling.
Research
User Personas
Key takeaways from:
Heuristics:
- Include user proposition on home page
- Use visual navigation rather than a "hamburger" menu
- Make website content look less like they could be advertisements
- Make it clear that there is a real company behind the website.
UX Best Practices:
- No perpetual scrolling
- Indicate things that are clearly clickable (in my redesign, all images are clickable)
Card Sort: Some of the existing categories on IMDb are redundant (e.g. there is a "Top 250" for both movies and TV shows)
- I proposed a "Browse" category, yet my testers were against the proposition.
- "News" category for all pages ending in "News" in addition to an upcoming release calendar.
User Testing: The events page is a perpetual scroll with the names of all movie events, THAT'S IT. The system can easily be circumvented via Ctrl+F, but since we are dealing with the widest demographic in history, we are assuming the user does not know that shortcut. With that in mind, the other page I chose to re-design was the Events page.
Peer Feedback: Include a map pin for event hotspots
Ideation
Final Designs
Home Page
As it stands now, IMDb's home page is cluttered as a result of its perpetual scroll. Therefore, I decided to condense its contents into a quasi-navigation menu, thus removing the need for the hamburger icon at the top. The "Featured Movies" and "Top TV & Streaming" are the pages I decided would be the center of user traffic taking the site's wide demographic into account. I added a user proposition at the top of the page to clarify it was indeed IMDb, and I condensed the topics usually present on the home page into categories which the user can load a page for.
Next Steps
If I were to continue with this project, I would address the visual discontinuity of the site. It is impossible to ignore the fact that some pages are more antiquated than others. For instance, below is an example of a listing for a direct-to-video series, while the page on its right is of a user list containing said series. The page on the left is sleek and modern, whereas the page on the right is stuck in the era of Windows 7.
The page where a user can buy movie tickets in a theater also suffers from this discrepancy.
