Betterboxd

Identifying the Opportunity

Betterboxd was developed over six weeks by a team of six as part of one of our earliest challenges at the Apple Developer Academy. The challenge began with interviewing fellow learners to uncover frustrations, unmet needs, and opportunities where we could create meaningful impact.

As we explored the media review space, a recurring concern emerged: online opinions often felt polarising, lacking nuance, and, at times, unnecessarily hostile. Our interviews highlighted how quickly review communities could become toxic, revealing an opportunity to rethink how people share and engage with their opinions.

Rather than creating another platform centred around public ratings and reviews, we saw potential in a more personal approach.

This insight helped shape Betterboxd:

A guided film-journaling experience that shifts the focus from defending opinions to exploring them.

My Role: Lead Product Designer

As the team's appointed Lead Product Designer, I helped shape Betterboxd's initial concept and was involved in design decisions throughout the project, from early ideation to the final interactive high-fidelity prototype.

My responsibilities spanned the broader product experience, including defining user flows, exploring interaction patterns, evaluating design alternatives, and shaping the overall interface.

Beyond the design work itself, a significant part of my role involved facilitating discussions and navigating differing perspectives within the team.

With six people bringing their own ideas and strong opinions to the table, disagreements were frequent. I learned to approach these conversations not as obstacles, but as opportunities to challenge assumptions, understand different viewpoints, and work towards decisions that supported the product's vision.

As my first experience leading product design within a collaborative project, Betterboxd was an important introduction to both the practical and interpersonal responsibilities of the role.

Finding the Right Balance

The central challenge in designing Betterboxd's journaling experience was balancing meaningful reflection with the user's time, attention, and autonomy.

We wanted guiding prompts to serve as starting points, rather than questions users felt obligated to answer. Too little structure could leave users unsure where to begin, while too much risked turning a personal, reflective experience into something that felt like homework.

Our goal was to encourage thoughtful engagement without demanding it, giving users the freedom to reflect as deeply or casually as they wished.

Structuring the Reflection

Through our research, we identified four aspects of filmmaking to structure the experience around:

• Story & Screenplay
• Cinematography
• Acting & Performances
• Sound & Music

Rather than presenting multiple questions per category, we chose to offer one guiding prompt for each. This gave users a framework for exploring different dimensions of a film, without prescribing how much they needed to share.

The intention wasn't to encourage longer responses, but to make meaningful reflection approachable, regardless of the time or energy users wanted to invest.

Curating the Right Questions

We also explored how the guiding prompts would be generated. One possibility was using AI to generate questions dynamically. While this offered greater variety, we were concerned that it could produce prompts that lacked the specificity and thoughtfulness we wanted. Instead, we proposed a finite, carefully curated question bank, with prompts tailored to each filmmaking category.

The Generate Different Question feature would draw from this collection, allowing users to find a prompt that resonated with them while preserving the quality and consistency of the experience.

Capturing Emotion Through Voice

Inspired by our team's habit of sending voice notes to friends after watching films, we introduced voice recording as an alternative to typing.

Beyond providing another way to express thoughts, we were drawn to the idea of:

Preserving not just what someone thought about a film, but how they felt in that moment.

Tone, excitement, and hesitation can convey emotions that written words alone may not fully capture, allowing users to revisit their reflections through the voice of their past self.

For the recording interaction, we drew inspiration from Instagram's familiar voice messaging pattern. Rather than reinventing an established interaction, we wanted recording to feel natural and effortless, keeping the focus on expression rather than learning a new interface.

Making progress visible and navigable

Although a relatively small element of the interface, the progress indicator required considerable exploration. We considered a continuous progress bar, a segmented indicator with a numerical counter, and a segmented indicator on its own.

The continuous bar felt less effective at communicating progress between individual questions. More importantly, we wanted users to be able to navigate directly between prompts by tapping the corresponding segment.

With a maximum of six segments, this approach gave each step a distinct, tappable area.

We ultimately removed the numerical counter, as the segments already communicated both the user's current position and the remaining steps.

The final design combined progress tracking and direct navigation into a single component, without introducing redundant information.

Where Do Ratings Belong?

We explored three approaches to integrating star ratings into the journaling flow: presenting them before reflection, placing them after each corresponding prompt, or grouping them into a dedicated section at the end.

Introducing ratings upfront risked framing the experience around evaluation before users had begun reflecting, conflicting with Betterboxd's emphasis on personal expression.

Placing ratings after each prompt offered a potential advantage: users could evaluate an aspect of the film immediately after considering it. However, it also introduced a repeated shift between reflecting on an experience and assigning it a numerical score.

We felt these interruptions could disrupt the reflective mindset we wanted to preserve.

Ultimately, we chose to group ratings at the end, allowing users to focus on their thoughts before moving into evaluation.

While this meant potentially sacrificing some rating precision, we considered it a worthwhile trade-off.

Ratings were intended to complement the journaling experience, not define it.

A Direct Path to Journaling

We wanted journaling to feel like a distinct experience within Betterboxd, while remaining seamlessly connected to the rest of the app. As the product's central feature, we felt that starting a new journal entry deserved more prominence than a conventional tab bar item.

We introduced a dedicated Add Journal button, visually separated from the rest of the navigation and positioned in the bottom-right corner. Its distinctive circular treatment was intended to make the action immediately recognisable and accessible, giving users a consistent entry point to the journaling experience.

But making the button prominent was only part of the solution. We also wanted to minimise the steps between deciding to journal and actually beginning.

Rather than directing users through the app's broader search experience, the button opens a dedicated, simplified film search. By removing unrelated search categories and displaying only films, we kept the interface focused on the task at hand.

From there, users simply select a film and begin journaling.

This creates a more direct alternative to the standard discovery flow, where users would otherwise need to search for a film, navigate to its details page, and then locate the journaling action.

The Buffer Page: Creating a Moment of Intentionality

While we wanted to minimise the effort required to begin journaling, we didn't necessarily want the transition into reflection to feel instantaneous.

After selecting a film, users arrive at a dedicated introductory screen featuring its artwork and key details. This was a deliberate pause, designed to help users acknowledge the film they were about to reflect on before stepping into the journaling experience.

We also introduced an upward swipe gesture to begin journaling, turning the transition into a small, intentional action.

Rather than treating every additional interaction as unnecessary friction, we wanted this moment to serve a purpose: creating a clear separation between finding a film and reflecting on it.

Separating Discovery from Personal History

One of the challenges we faced when designing the search experience was accommodating two distinct needs: exploring a broader database of films, actors, and directors, and quickly finding movies users had already journaled about.

While we wanted to provide access to useful film information, we were conscious of Betterboxd's identity as a personal journaling app rather than an extensive film encyclopaedia. We explored different ways to organise these search experiences before drawing inspiration from Apple Music's approach to separating its wider catalogue from a user's personal library.

Adapting this familiar pattern, we divided the search interface into two tabs: All Movies and Journaled.

The first gives users access to the broader film database, including actors and directors, while the second narrows the results to films they've previously reflected on. This distinction allowed us to accommodate discovery without losing sight of Betterboxd's central purpose. Users could explore the world of film while remaining one step away from their own reflections.

The Power of Restraint

Going into Betterboxd, I underestimated just how much thought and deliberation would go into designing something seemingly simple.

One of the most valuable lessons I took from the challenge was the importance of designing with intention, particularly knowing when to stop.

During an Academy session, our Head of Academy introduced us to the power of restraint in design.

Good design is as much about what you choose to leave out as what you choose to include.

That idea fundamentally changed how I approached the project.

This philosophy became a guiding principle throughout Betterboxd. From limiting the number of reflection prompts to carefully considering the placement of ratings, we continually questioned whether each element genuinely contributed to the experience we wanted to create.

I learned that designing a thoughtful experience doesn't necessarily mean introducing more features or removing every possible interaction. It means understanding what deserves the user's attention, what can be simplified, and where a deliberate moment of pause can add value.

Learning to Lead Through Collaboration

As my first experience leading product design within a team, Betterboxd also challenged my understanding of collaboration. Working alongside five equally passionate teammates meant navigating frequent disagreements, competing ideas, and different perspectives on what the product should become.

I quickly learned that design leadership wasn't about having the strongest opinion or the final say. It was about creating space for healthy discussion, being receptive to ideas that challenged my own, and helping the team find common ground without losing sight of our shared vision.

The experience taught me to value the process of arriving at a decision just as much as the decision itself.

Looking Ahead

While Betterboxd culminated in an interactive high-fidelity prototype, there are still aspects of the experience I'd love to explore through usability testing.

I'd be particularly interested in understanding how users respond to the guiding prompts, whether the intentional transition into journaling encourages a more reflective mindset, and where the experience could be simplified further.

Ultimately, Betterboxd gave me a much deeper appreciation for the complexity behind seemingly simple experiences.

Every element should earn its place in a design.