catchflix.com Blog

The “shipped” notification email now includes the Blue Dart tracking number (Waybill No.) of the DVD packages shipped to you. You can go to http://www.bluedart.com or call their customer service centers in your city to check the status of your delivery.

Our original Watch List emails were not turning out to be very useful. As multiple members have the same movie on their Watch List they would all get emails when a copy becomes available. One of them would be the first one to rent the movie and when all the others log in, they would again find the movie unavailable. It sort of created a race condition.

We are now sending you a personalized summary of the movies on Watch List saying which ones are available for you to rent and which are not. This will be a weekly email. And to avoid (or rather, minimize) the race condition, we will be spreading out this email through out the week with different groups of members getting it on different days of the week.

Send us your feedback once you start getting this weekly Watch List email. And yes, you can opt out of it – the emails will have a link for that.

Forget categories. Forget genres. Think themes.

Want to see World War II movies? Or perhaps Espionage Thrillers? How about some mushy Romantic Dramas back-to-back with an Immigrant Comedy?  Here is a whole new way to find movies – themes. We are tagging all the movies in our collections under nearly 100 themes that range from Animation to Art Films, from Courtroom Dramas to Military Dramas, from Sports to Psychological Thrillers. You can now find movies based on these fine and granular themes.

The interesting idea is that most movies will fall under multiple themes. Iqbal, for example, has a Sports theme along with Million Dollar Baby, but it is also an Inspirational Story, as is Schindler’s List, which is also a World War II movie, just like Life Is Beautiful is which is also a Foreign movie, just like Memoirs of a Geisha… I guess you get the idea. We are confident that this new way to browse movies will make it super-easy for you to find the kind of movies you enjoy.

One caveat though… as you can imagine, tagging of movies to themes is a massive data-mapping task and we have been able to complete it only partially so far. Not all the movies have been mapped to their themes so you might see only a few movies in under some themes. And you may find some movies conspicuously absent from some themes (no Cars in Animation!). But we are working on completing this task; it will be done in a few weeks. That’s the reason this feature is still marked Beta. But, hey, there are enough movies under all the themes already that you would not have found otherwise – if you like Deadly Disasters, there are more than ten movies under that and you may not have seen them all.

And let us know if you can think of some other themes that we should add.

http://www.catchflix.com/themes.php

Here is something that must have annoyed you on our website. It is a usability issue that you end up on the same starting page after adding a movie to your Watch List or after clicking Continue Browsing on the cart page. You could not continue browsing where you had left. This is now fixed.

The system now remembers where you were (which page of which category) and takes you back there when you click on Add to Watch List and Continue Browsing.

Thanks to some RVM Simha and Soumendra Daas who reported this issue (and in great detail).

“The use case is that I am trying to browse for English Comedy movies and adding them to my Watch List. So let’s try that and see what happens…

1. Login to my account
2. Select “English” from the list on the left side
3. Click on Comedy
4. There are 32 pages (good!).  I do not see anything interesting on Page 1, so I click on the right-arrow to go to page 2 … then to page 3..
5. Page 3 has “Look Who’s Talking” – I think I would like to watch this some day. So I click on the movie title
6. The page changes to give the details of “Look who is talking”.
7. I click on “Add to WatchList”

Now something strange happens – I get returned to page 1 of ALL English movies. Remember I was on page 3 of English comedy movies. This means that if I was looking for English comedy movies (which I was) I need to start all over again

If this sounds confusing, let me know and I will demo this to you.”

- Soumendra Daas, Bangalore

“A friend of mine pointed out glitch on your site.
 
1. He clicked on Alphabetical
2. He clicks on a movie on Page 1. It is not available. He adds it to his watch list.
3. He moves on to Page 3. He clicks on a movie. It is not available. Now comes the glitch. When he adds the movie to the watch list, he is taken back to Page 1 instead of Page 3.  That too Page 1 of Recent Additions and not Page 1 of Alphabetical.
 
I have tried this myself and found that whenever you add a movie to a watch list you are automatically redirected to Page 1 of Recent Additions. My friend is a very patient sort who actually reached Page 58 before he got irritated and reached for the phone to order a couple of movies for the long weekend from his local DVD library. It was the first time my friend was on your site and he was about to place his order and you guys lost him. Do let me know when this glitch becomes ‘unglitched’ so I can order movies from you guys.”

- RVM Simha, Mumbai

Thanks, Simha and Dass, for your feedback.

Let us know if you see any such usability issues or have any other ideas or suggestions. We are always looking for ways to make renting movies on Catchflix easier and more fun. Email us at info@catchflix.com.