Thrudigital

The UK Film Council have just launched findanyfilm.com which features information on over 30,000 films. The site, which was built by agency Blue Barracuda, was billed as the UK’s google for film in this article on the Guardian and allows users to search a large database for a synopsis, and links to download, rent or buy the film.In my opinion, I think the site is more of a film database with an extensive affiliate program and aggregation of cinema listings than a search engine but that’s not why I chose to write this article. I think there are a few areas where the site could improve and as we’d like to see it as a success I thought I would post my thoughts here.Idea One: Show more content on the homepageSo lets start with the homepage. The first thing that struck me when arriving on the homepage was the lack of content. This of course could have been intentional as, being termed the UK’s Google for film, maybe they are also trying to mimic the minimal design of the search engine. If this was what they planned I think they’ve done this pretty well as the homepage doesn’t feature a huge amount of content. My opinion though, is on a site that contains so much content, it would be better to feature more of it on the homepage. Take a leaf from amazons book, when online users have a relatively short attention span, you want to be able to appeal to a user pretty quickly and the amazon homepage features a range of products from many different product categories, so it’s pretty likely that whoever looks at the page will see something of interest.Idea Two: Add sharing functionalityA lot of people now are used to, and often expect sharing options so it seems a shame that with so much content there isn’t anyway to share it.  Furthermore, sharing adds an additional marketing opportunity to the site, and as the project is rumoured to be having £500,000 spent on optimising the site for search you can only imagine they are serious about people finding the site, so why not help your users share the content with their friends. Also, not only is this marketing free but the site is also given a stamp of approval by the person who sends the recommendation to a friend.Idea Three: Add other social functionality: favourite/rating/reviewing/list functionalityIn addition to sharing functionality, the ability for users to be able to favourite a film and create lists of favourite films allows a deeper level of interaction in the site. Currently there isn’t a reason for me to register for the site (infact, you can’t register at all), but the addition of reviews, rating etc. would create a reason to do so, while the creation of lists and the sharing of these might give me a more compelling reason to return to the site as well as having the added benefit of further filtering the content for other users of the site which is very important when there is so much content on the site.Idea Four: Better recommendation engineThe other major area that I think could be improved is how similar content is recommended. Recommendations, along with reviews, ratings and lists will, as Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail details, helps users filter through the content which is massively important when a site features so much content. However recommendations, while present on the site, aren’t very accurate. If the page for the Dark Knight was to be used as an example, it would be good to see other films by Christopher Nolan (the Director), other films Christian Bale (lead actor) is in as well as other Batman films. Admittedly the page does offer some related films but they don’t seem to be that relevant to me and unfortunately I can’t rate them accordingly to help the system improve its recommendation algorithm.There is a good chance that for the £500,000 the UK Film Council have spent on the development of the site some of these functionalities are already in the pipeline. I hope the team behind the site have them planned in a later phase as I think they will make the site more compelling.On a final note, if anyone on the team would like to meet to discuss any further ideas, please feel free to contact us and we’d be happy to chat.