Movie Tarot was an app that could predict the box office collection of a film as well as its Happiness Factor prior to the film’s release. Ever since we put together MT, we’ve never had to spend a dime on ‘crappy’ films. We always knew the ones that would be worth watching in the theatres. This was precisely what we set out to do; help movie buffs make the right choice.

Looking back at things — the intent of Movie Tarot was right; everyone wanted to know if the film was worth spending their money on. But for some reason MT didn’t quite click. It was a technologically sound project, but we may’ve lacked the same ‘soundness’ on the user-end of things.

Design vs User Experience

We designed MT to look exquisite; the image centric layouts, the shadows, the grunge and texture were meant to make the app look contemporary. We succeeded at it alright, but in the process overlooked user-experience. Some of our users couldn’t tell the buttons apart from the images. This meant reduced user engagement.

The Reason for a user to retain the app

We strongly believe this is where we got it wrong. Our predictions for a friday film would come out on monday. That left a window of just 4 days (monday to thursday) where the app was of ‘real utility’. By thursday night or early Friday morning, reviews of the film would’ve come out and our prediction was no longer relevant. This elemental flaw meant that it was far more difficult to get ‘normal’ movie goers to retain the app.

Skeptics in the Movie business

Most people within the movie business saw MT as a double edged sword. Though they liked the thought of being labelled as a good film prior to release; but hated the flip side. A lot of them were also skeptical about the tech & our process. They felt we measure the critical value of a film; but all we did was predict how people would react after watching the film.

Movie Tarot is no longer available on the store. It had somewhere between 10,000-15,000 app downloads and 890,000+ page-views when we took it down. Among them were some ‘real movie buffs’ who loved the idea of MT as much as we loved making it. They do drop in occasional queries on the eve of much HYPED releases. Besides personal use, it’s for them that we use Movie Tarot now.

If you’re looking forward to watching a film this weekend, do drop a line @movietarot and we would be glad to help you choose. ☺