Case Study
Reframing Letterboxd
Based on 50+ mined community reviews and an audit of five competing apps, I identified three high-impact opportunities for Letterboxd's mobile app: centralize social, fix navigation consistency, and add the TV tracking users kept asking for.
Click through the full prototype above, or open it in Figma → (opens in new tab)
30-second summary
Problem
Social features have no clear home, navigation is inconsistent, and ~30% of mined reviews asked for TV tracking that doesn't exist.
Approach
Secondary research containing community reviews and competitor audits. Gathered data was used to ideate the proper solutions.
Key decision
Four targeted changes while preserving the Letterboxd identity that reviews name as the reason people love the app.
Status
Concept only. Not built, not user-tested. The business case is reasoned from the research.
The problem
To find out where Letterboxd's mobile app was falling short, I audited five competitor apps (Trakt, IMDb, Taste, TV Time, Goodreads) and read through community reviews and forum threads looking for repeated, specific complaints rather than one-off frustrations.
No home
Social features exist but are scattered across screens with no obvious entry point.
Inconsistent
Navigation patterns shift depending on where you are in the app, so nothing feels learnable.
~30%
of mined reviews wanted TV tracking that doesn't exist, naming Trakt and TV Time, repeatedly.
One user had already designed the fix in their head: "there should be a toggle button that switches the UI to all TV shows until you toggle it back to movies."
Two people, one app
Alex, the curator
Wants depth: award-based discovery, curated lists, critic-level detail on what he's watching.
Jasmine, the sharer
Wants connection: what her friends watched, replying to reviews, arguing about last night's episode.
Neither was served by one undifferentiated activity feed. Any fix had to work for both without turning into two separate apps.
Four moves, no rebuild
The minimalist, film-first identity is most of why people love Letterboxd. So the redesign stayed narrow: four targeted changes, each stemming from pulled complaints.
1. Give social an actual home
Friends' activity and the add-friends action move from buried in submenus to the top of a unified feed.
2. Give the profile one home base
Diary, Watchlist, and Lists lived behind separate top tabs above an ad-interrupted feed. The redesigned library grid puts every collection one tap away from the profile itself.
3. Make posters work harder
Award badges and age ratings sit just below the poster, so recognition happens at a glance.
4. TV, on its own terms
A toggle switches the whole UI between film and TV mode: episode reviews, season tracking, separate feeds.
From sketch to shipped-looking screens
I started with low-fidelity to validate the new information architecture, mid-fidelity to add and validate new content and TV tracking, high-fidelity to lock the visual system. An orange accent (in the existing Letterboxd palette) was implemented for TV mode allowing users to know exactly which side of the app they're on.
Current
1. Social home
2. Profile
3. Posters
4. TV
Redesign
1. Social home
2. Profile
3. Posters
4. TV
Hover or tab to a screen to zoom in; select it to open the full-size image. Each column pairs with the matching move above.
Why this would matter to Letterboxd
No live product means no retention or revenue numbers to report, so here's my reasoning that ties each decision to improved stakeholder value.
Retention, against a named competitor
Almost 30% of the reviews mined were asking for TV tracking Letterboxd doesn't have, pointing users to competitors such as Trakt and TV Time.
Engagement, from a named gap
Social features existing with "no clear home" is a discoverability problem with a direct engagement cost: a feature users can't find is a feature that doesn't drive return visits; centralizing it targets session frequency.
Protecting what's already working
The redesign stayed to four targeted changes to keep the identity intact. A business case for change has to survive not damaging the retention driver that's already working.
What I learned
This is built on secondary research of what active users request the most online, not direct sessions with Letterboxd users. What this taught me was discipline: every decision traces to a pattern that showed up repeatedly.
It also taught me restraint. It would have been easy to turn "add TV support" into an excuse to redesign half the app. Shipping four changes that answer real complaints, and leaving the rest of Letterboxd's identity alone, was harder than it sounds as an avid user.