Seen't
( personal project )
I believe recommending something to a person you care about is a sacred act.
Taking the time to make a thoughtful and precise recommendation is incredibly rewarding, especially if it's for something that you also share a love for. Taste is sometimes elusive. Taste is sometimes conditional. Giving someone a great recommendation is akin to giving them a personal gift; it shows that you care to understand something that they care about.
Seen't is an app that was born out of a collective frustration from me and my friends with a movie review app called Letterboxd. Letterboxd describes themselves as a "Global community of cinephiles" and a "social platform for sharing your taste in film". I actually think they deliver on these promises quite well. The Letterboxd community is full of budding critics and cinephiles chomping at the bit to expatiate upon anything from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" to "Inside Out 2". While these community reviews can be entertaining and informative, I believe Letterboxd is fundamentally (and unintentionally) anti-friends.
It often feels like a PhD in Letterboxd navigation is required to perform basic tasks like finding and following anyone specific. If you're skilled enough to master this, you're rewarded with reviews from the people you actually care to hear from, tucked away in a dusty, dark corner of the app.
This is where Seen't comes in.
Seen't is still very early in its design process. What I have designed does not currently reflect the long-term vision, but rather an intermediary step to audit and validate the foundational elements of what someone needs to log, review, and share movies with their friends.
A friend focused experience
The long-term goal is to build a movie-sharing experience that truly feels friend-focused. I'm envisioning features like friend taste match scores, favorite movies in common, and a way to recommend movies to your friends that will special every time.
Part of the early exploration phase involved building prototypes with Figma or SwiftUI to test interaction-heavy features like a creative-driven editor. I found refining interactions to be very beneficial with prototyping. It's much easier to intuit where something is missing or where the next button should go when you have an actual interactive product in your hands. I see this as akin to writing music sometimes, where the next element you add or change just feels like the intuitive next step.
I think fun and engaging features like this make an app like Seen't worth sharing with your friends. When users are given the freedom to create, reviews and recommendations can feel more personalized, thoughtful, funny, and evocative.
The ranking system
The hardest problem to solve so far has been the ranking / review system. My friends and I complain about Letterboxd's "Stars" ranking system as lacking nuance and context. But something more precise like Beli's relative/comparative ranking system is overwhelming and often forces incommensurable comparisons. Another consideration is that while some users are obsessed with accurate rankings, others seem to not care or avoid ranking altogether.
I considered making rankings more contextual: based on genre or tonal similarities throughout the ranking experience to alleviate occurences of inapt comparisons.
The brand
I love branding. I love the way it takes shape while you build a product. And when the time comes to actually start putting the brand together, it already feels so natural and from-the-heart. I'd been living within it for the past year and now it felt like was tracing over a sketch that was already there.
Seen't felt like a really fun app that deserved a really fun brand. I remember spending hours one night drawing hundreds of "S" shapes until I finally landed on one that felt like the right mix of squishy, rebellious, and fun.
I wanted to keep Seent's brand dynamic so it could fit in alongside any movie shot, poster, or admat. The app is full of a variety of colors from movie posters and it didn't feel right to pin one singular "theme" color to Seen't besides black and cool grays. Instead Seent's brand colors could just be described as "colorful" and seek to reflect and house the great content created within the app.
