| My impressions in order from positive to negative are that the visual appearance is great, the UI is OK, and the actual recommendations are poor. For the UI, I think a verb like "Rate" would be much better than "I've seen this". I like the in-place popup with the stars. Unlike some others, I felt like having 4 options didn't let me distinguish between movies that were enjoyable, and movies that I'd call my favorites. Showing a movie summary on hover would be helpful. Clicking the image and then going back scrolls to the top of the page if you rated the movie on the details page. Inability to click to see details on movies already rated was awkward, as sometimes I'd rate a movie and then be unsure if it was the movie I thought it was. Would be nice to know if "Hide" implies "Not Interested" for the recommendations, or just doesn't show it again. I liked the ability to just jump in and rate things, but forced sign up to proceed felt slimy. Better to nag here ("Your ratings might be lost if you leave the site before you create an account") than sneak up on the user and force them to comply. If it hadn't been a Show HN, I would have bailed here. The real problem for me was the quality of recommendations. I rated 300+ movies, and didn't feel like I got any recommendations for movies that I felt at all compelled to act on. I don't think any of the recommendations were ones that I'd rate as "Amazing", and I didn't see any drop off in "likability" from the top to middle of the list. Obviously some of this is preconception (maybe I'd love that particular Disney film despite disliking all the others) but preconception needs to be considered to build the user's trust. The recommended movies that I knew about were generally in the "classic that everyone likes but I don't care about" class. It felt like many of the movies that I didn't know about were mostly in the "popular sequel to a movie I've already ranked as awful". If I've already ranked multiple Batman and Superman movies as awful, suggesting that I have a 63% match the "Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice" makes it hard to trust your methods. Much of the problems for me are probably caused by the small dataset you are using, not just in terms of ratings but in the catalog itself. I was able to find some of my favorite movies by searching directly for them (Primer, Adam's Apples, Once Were Warriors), but many just weren't in your dataset (Ararat, Metropolitan, Fast Cheap and out of Control, Incident at Loch Ness). Bootstrapping a recommendation engine is difficult, but for me I didn't feel I got any return on effort. The things that would most improve the site for me would be browsing with item-by-item similarity (people who loved this also loved), ability to directly see ratings by people with similar tastes (needs to be opt-in), ability to see "sandbox" recommendations (if I liked X and hated Y, and if my wife like Y but hated Z, what movie would be both enjoy?), ability to browse by director (I presume others would want actor), and ability to filter recommendations by date (in my case, exclude any pre-1980 films). Good luck! |