Social movie discovery through people you trust
Cinephile is a social-first movie discovery platform designed around one simple idea: The best movie recommendations come from people you trust—not algorithms.
Instead of endless rows of random suggestions, Cinephile helps users discover films through their circle: friends, reviewers they follow, and people with similar taste. The product combines movie tracking, watchlists, reviews, public profiles, and a social activity feed into a cinematic experience that feels personal, visual, and alive.
This project was explored using vibe design + vibe coding workflows, where I used Google Stitch for rapid interface exploration and Antigravity for translating ideas into working product experiences. The goal was to move from concept → interface → live functionality extremely fast while still keeping product thinking and UX quality at the center.
Most movie platforms solve discovery through algorithms. But users often ask:
Traditional platforms don’t answer these questions naturally. The challenge was to design a unified interface hosting a movie tracker, a social network, a watchlist manager, a review platform, and a taste-driven discovery engine without making it feel overwhelming like standard social media.
The entire experience needed to feel cinematic, premium, social, fast, visual, and highly scannable.
We designed the product to help movie lovers connect and explore naturally through these six distinct actions:
Explore the live visual components of Cinephile. Use the tabs below to toggle between the **Social Circle Feed**, Viki's **Public Profile view**, and an **Interactive Reviewer** where you can post mock reactions that dynamically prepend onto the live social stream:
Redesigned as a social-first discovery surface prioritizing meaningful context over random rows. Includes Hot in Your Circle (trending based on friends), Circle Moments (live watched, rated, and watchlist cards), Next Watch suggestions based on taste overlap, and Genre Spotlight.
A complete review flow allowing users to rate movies, add written reviews, and leave short reactions. These feed directly into the movie pages, profile timelines, and the social circle feed to power discovery.
Designed around the reality that users have watched films for years before joining, supporting both daily logging and bulk lifetime movie archiving.
Every user gets a shareable profile URL under Instagram-style handles (e.g. @aviyrik) showcasing display name, followers, watched counts, and average ratings.
Renamed from "Network" to "Circle" to emphasize trust. Features dedicated follow/unfollow states, follower/following counts, recent friend activity, and "People You May Like" suggestion modules.
Includes optimized global search for movies and people, custom empty states for new or logged-out users, and a robust **Dummy Social Data Engine** designed to bulk-create/delete followers and watchlists during testing phases.
Cinephile became a strong experiment in AI-assisted product creation, balancing rapid delivery with rigorous design principles:
Cinephile evolved into a working social movie platform prototype with rich discovery, reviews, profiles, social feeds, tracking, responsive experiences, and a scalable UX foundation.
Most importantly, the project successfully proved how **vibe design + vibe coding** workflows can massively accelerate product building and prototyping cycles without losing any depth in strategic UX thinking, visual craft, or product strategy.
Cinephile was about designing for emotion and exploration—bringing the shared feeling of cinema into a modern digital product experience. Prototyping this concept reminded me that the strongest recommendations will always be human, and that rapid technical workflows can still deliver premium, polished product experiences when guided by rigorous design fundamentals.