Role & Summary
Led the redesign of BookMyShow's trailer widget to support multiple languages and video formats within the same footprint, ending the need for users to leave the app to watch trailers in their language.
Business Context
More movies were releasing in multiple languages, and production houses supplied a steady daily inventory of trailers, teasers, songs, and dialogue promos for each one. But the synopsis page could only show a single trailer in a single language. Customers who didn't speak the primary language listed couldn't watch a trailer on BookMyShow at all. They had to leave for another platform. The business was sitting on video inventory it already had rights to and simply wasn't surfacing.
Strategic Decision
Redesign the Widget vs. Redesign the Page
Context: solving multi-language trailers properly could have meant reworking the synopsis page's layout for a dedicated video section.
Options: (1) redesign the page to carve out more space for video, or (2) constrain the solution to the existing widget's footprint and solve it through interaction design.
Trade-off: redesigning could unlock more room long-term, but meant a bigger, slower project riding on an unscheduled redesign. Working within the widget was faster but harder: solving multi-language browsing in an already-small space.
Decision: work within the existing widget's footprint first, treating a fuller video library as a later phase once the synopsis page shipped anyway.
Why: the inventory problem was urgent and didn't need to wait on an unscheduled redesign. This delivered the core value (watching a trailer in your language) fast, while leaving room for a proper library later.
Design Principles
1. Solve Within the Space You Have: the fix had to work inside the existing widget footprint, not require a page redesign.
2. Every Option Gets Prototyped, Not Argued: two genuinely different interaction models were built and evaluated before choosing a direction.
3. Script Discipline in Language Labels: never render an entire label in a foreign script; pair a native-script letter with the English name so it stays legible.
4. Design for Reuse: the eventual gallery component was built to be dropped into other parts of the app, not just this page.
Key Product Decisions
1. Merged two prototyped interactions into a third: a carousel widget combining a visible video count with language filter chips tested as more intuitive than either original option, inside the same widget footprint.
2. Native-script letter + English name for language labels: avoided rendering full labels in a script users might not read, keeping the language switcher legible regardless of which scripts a user could read.
3. Evolved into a reusable video gallery: a follow-on phase grouping all videos by language, built as a component reusable elsewhere in the app rather than stopping at the widget-level fix.
Outcomes
Business: recovered engagement value from video inventory BookMyShow already had rights to but wasn't surfacing, reducing users who left the app to watch trailers elsewhere.
Customer: users could now watch a movie's trailer in their own language directly on BookMyShow, without switching platforms.
Operations: the shipped solution fit inside the existing widget footprint, avoiding a dependency on an unscheduled page redesign.
Engineering: the eventual gallery mode was built as a reusable component for use elsewhere in the app.
Support: no support-specific data was available for this feature.
Reflection
The biggest surprise was that neither of our two first options was the right answer: the right answer was a specific combination of both. It's a reminder that "pick one of the options you designed" isn't always the job; sometimes the job is noticing what each option is missing and merging the parts that work. I'd also flag the video-library ambition earlier next time and sequence toward it more deliberately, instead of treating it as a stretch goal that only became real once an unrelated page redesign created the space for it.
The principle I still use: a script-rendering detail (never spelling out a full word in a script your user might not read) is exactly the kind of small decision that determines whether a feature actually serves the audience it was built for, or just looks like it does.
