REQ: more details in the search list

[punkyard]

Description

when searching a movie, it's not always easy to remember the poster, its exact name ..

Desired Behavior

**in the search list:

• show bigger poster
• show director's name and year of release**

Additional Context

• show a list of main actors
• show a short résumé

[punkyard]

what do you think of these features?

[leepeuker]

I personally never had an issue before when searching, but I see your point in general. My inspiration for the current design was the letterboxd mobile view (I am using this for years, so I am probably just very accustomed to it like this):

To your concrete suggestions:

• bigger poster
  • they are relatively small on on purpose, so that we can show more search results on the screen (less scrolling)
  • the idea was that the user is mainly using the title and the year to search the results, the poster is meant more as a visual support and not as the primary focus
• the directors name is a great idea, I will definitively add this!
• the year of the release is already displayed
• the main actors would take to much space in the search results I think
• same goes for the short resume. maybe we could add the tagline, but I am not sure if this would really help

The idea of the search results is to not show much data on purpose, so that the user can very quickly see and scan the results, without having to scroll a lot and be distracted by things which are most of the time not necessary to identify a movie.

What do you think about this?

[leepeuker]

I had a quick look, adding the director is not that easy, the search endpoint of TMDB does not return this information. We would have to send additional requests for each movie in the search results to get the director. That will have impact on the loading time of the search results. I will build a prototype to check how noticeable this is, maybe we could add this as an optional feature 🤔

[punkyard]

ok I see, that's the phone display.
Here is what I see on my PC screen:

I'm trying to add many of the films I've seen. Sometimes I'm not sure of the title, actors, or I have no memory of the poster. It would be great (in this case) to see poster information better.

Thanks for your pleasant understanding!

[punkyard]

about bigger poster, actors name and resume, do you see sometimes how streaming websites display these information in a frame that appears when mouse is over?

[leepeuker]

ok I see, that's the phone display

This is the desktop view used at letterboxd:

It shows even less than on mobile 😄

I'm trying to add many of the films I've seen. Sometimes I'm not sure of the title, actors, or I have no memory of the poster. It would be great (in this case) to see poster information better.

Hm I see. I agree that the "Add movie" search is not very good for this use case, but that is because it is focused on a different use case. When you have added your past movies you will usually only add movies you have recently watched and for them you do not need much information (title and year should basically enough, more is only needed if there are two movies with the same title in the same year which is very rare). So in the normal day to day usage of an average user (who already has imported his/her past movies) the displayed information should be more than enough. The more data is displayed and the bigger the posters are, the more you have to scroll and scan the screen for something you already know pretty well what it is.
I would recommend to search for your past movies that you do not remember exactly on other platforms that are more build around this use case (like tmdb, imdb, etc) and than add them to Movary.

about bigger poster, actors name and resume, do you see sometimes how streaming websites display these information in a frame that appears when mouse is over?

Streaming websites are focused on you finding movies to watch. They give you as much information as possible with the goal to get your view. To decide if you want to watch a movie it makes sense to show you e.g. the description of it or the cast. Movary is where you go afterwards, when you have watched a movie (or you want to search for movies you have already logged).

[alifeee]

this is the information we get from the default search endpoint

so, one thing which is not yet used is "description"

I have added it in #672 which I think helps somewhat towards differentiating similar movies from one another, and doesn't make the height of each item any larger (as it cuts off with "….")