Lista

iOS & Web App for Entertainment Tracking

Background

I've designed an app to discover, organize, and share books, games, movies, TV shows, and podcasts. I'm also currently building the front- and back-end for this app.

Lista highlights my skills in all areas of UX, UI, and engineering. It's been one of the most rewarding projects I've ever worked on because of the number and variety of problems I've attempted to solve, based on research that fascinates me.

My Roles

I'm the sole designer and developer (partly out of necessity, but mainly because I'm a generalist who loves learning new things). Some highlights:

Research: Competitive analysis, interviews, and user testing to figure out what people like and dislike about current similar offerings and how they feel about prototypes I've made
Design: Crafted high-fidelity interactive prototypes for both mobile iOS and desktop web; created mobile & desktop design system to support this
Front-End Dev: I wrote an iOS app with SwiftUI that connects to open-source APIs for media data
Back-End Dev: Most recently, I started learning Django to build a back-end API to store my own data

Success

User testing has shown that Lista surpasses competitors like Goodreads (book tracking) and Letterboxd (movie tracking) when it comes to ease-of-use and the functionality users care about most.

Timeline

I've spent over two years working on Lista. It's an ongoing process as I learn more front- and back-end skills to build what I've designed.

I developed this app using SwiftUI. This working version illustrates how a user can easily add a movie to their library.

Design rooted in research and craft

After conducting extensive competitive analysis and user interviews, I discovered several user frustrations in competing products that I've addressed throughout Lista.

User frustrations in competing products:

Users found it difficult to understand the possible actions they could take on most screens, due to clutter and confusing information hierarchy.
Search results were missing key contextual information — “Did I already add this movie?”
The process of adding a movie to your library was either too complex or not robust enough.

User frustrations? Solved.

Search

When a user searches for content, the results show whether a title is already in their library — it's a small detail that goes a long way.

Movie Detail

The most important information is displayed immediately and concisely. Possible actions are clear based on color and placement.

Search

The options are simple. No distractions.

Contextual Additional Options

Depending on which Library category a user selects, there are different optional details they can add.

Movie Added

Additional helpful information is added to movie detail to indicate state change.

A seamless experience across desktop & mobile

Another user frustration I solved for is design and feature parity between various platforms and screen sizes.

The Solution
From Day 1 of the design process, I treated desktop and mobile experiences equally. Every feature is available across all platforms and is designed consistently, making it easy for users to use whichever platform suits them at any given time.