NightCall
Designing a second-screen app that helps friend groups stop arguing and start watching.
Title
Industry
Date
Challenge
Picking a movie with friends sounds simple, but it almost never is. Someone always compromises, someone always dominates, and the group ends up scrolling for 30 minutes before settling on something nobody's excited about.
The real problem isn't a lack of options. It's that there's no good way to combine what everyone actually wants without making it awkward.
Approach
I designed NightCall as a phone-to-TV experience where everyone inputs their preferences privately, then the system finds the best overlap. The core loop is three steps: set your dealbreakers, pick your mood, and vote on the top matches. I focused on making each step feel fast and low-pressure so the whole process takes under four minutes.
I also built a fairness engine that tracks who compromised last time and gives them more weight in the next round.
NightCall turns a frustrating group negotiation into a quick, private, and fair process. By keeping individual preferences hidden and letting the algorithm do the matching, it removes the social pressure that usually leads to bad picks. The fairness boost makes sure the same person doesn't always lose out, which is the thing that actually matters when you're watching movies with the same group every week.
Works
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