Titles Instant Answer

Daily, millions of DuckDuckGo users search for specific movies or TV shows. Up until now, their queries were met by a host of unrelated links, providing poor user experience. Recognizing the need for a more sophisticated solution, I took the initiative to overhaul the project, except for the backend.

Summary

In the role of Project Lead, Product Designer, and Frontend Engineer, I could design an all-inclusive solution for users seeking specific movie or tv show titles. By dealing with this project from beginning to end, I aimed to improve user experience beyond just answering the query—it was about bypassing the need to sift through irrelevant links, and provide quick links to the other instant answers for Cast and Where To Watch that I built previously.

The real challenge rooted in devising a simple yet impactful solution. This new feature—displaying relevant titles for a searched movie or TV show—had to remain valuable in the long term and continue answering our users' intent. Developing a focused solution that utilised the IMDb dataset to provide the core information about a movie or TV show was tricky; provide too much information and you risk overwhelming someone, but provide too little and you risk offering no value. I think we hit the sweet spot on this, and both user testing, and real-world feedback have helped validate our assumptions and decisions were accurate.

By creating a new module type, one that encompasses multiple data sources and links out to other modules, and shaping design guidelines alongside a golden dataset, this project represents an important step in enhancing DuckDuckGo's capabilities as an entertainment query platform. Our finished UI makes finding information about specific titles efficient and straightforward.