Creator(s) of the Week: Can’t decide on a movie tonight? Let MoWe choose

Creator of the Week highlights success stories from our global app-building community. Do you have an AppGyver project you’d like us to feature? Message us at contact@appgyver.com.

Creators (pictured clockwise): Daniel Fischer, Mariana Hergl, Christina Speck, RuoLin Wang, Ann-Kathrin Remmele

Professions: Masters students in Business Informatics, Industrial Engineering, & Management at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Location: Karlsruhe, Germany

Solution: MoWe

In keeping with AppGyver’s recent trend of co-creation, this week we have a team of five masters students in Germany who want to bring friends and families together over cinema. MoWe app makes personalized movie recommendations, and also lets you form groups with friends to make social movie nights more fun and engaging.

Tell us why you’re doing this project, and what roles everyone had?

Christina: This is for our course on Engineering Interactive Systems, and the assignment was basically to use a movie database and think of a real problem that users might have. Right now, let’s be honest, there’s not a lot to do with corona, so we’re watching a lot of movies. We found that it takes a long time sometimes to find something to watch on Netflix or Amazon, so we thought of making an app that helps you pick one.

Daniel: There are different roles in the team, my part was mostly developing the backend and writing the REST API, and connecting it to AppGyver. The other students are defining user stories, testing out workflows, and designing in AppGyver. We can query directly from AppGyver to our Flask backend, and our database in MongoDB.

What stage is the app in now?

Daniel: We have the beta version, and the main functionalities are working. With the user testing happening now, we’re working on design and seeing if people understand how to use it. You can decide between searching for a specific movie, or if you don’t know what you want to watch, there’s also a function to suggest. You can choose from genres, movie lengths, see ratings from other people, and create groups that let you share movies with friends that everyone likes. For example, there’s a group called “Disney Lovers.” It pulls the movie info from our database, but in the future we’d like it to be able to access Netflix or some other services.

How was the building experience in Appgyver?

Daniel: We loved the fact that you don’t need a strong knowledge of coding for this. Our team has one person who’s creating the backend and should know how to code, but for other people who aren’t familiar with building apps from code, they can work easily in AppGyver.

RuoLin: This is the first time for me to create an app on a web-based app building platform. At first I was skeptical of the outcome of our project, but as soon as I started to use it, I had a different thought immediately.

AppGyver is really user friendly, and people with zero coding experience are able to learn how to create an app in the blink of an eye.

Any next steps for MoWe?

Daniel: We should try deploying for iOS and Android because we have no experience with this process. That’s also our main point of why we chose AppGyver, because you can build apps without coding, and we can deploy for both of those. It will also be interesting to see how AppGyver develops in the future, and what becomes available on the marketplace that would allow us to improve this app.

What kind of impact do you hope the app has?

Christina: Our main goal is that people enjoy using it and feel like they can connect to each other. Right now, many people are feeling lonely, so to have friend groups together and talk about the movies we watched, that can connect us in some way.

RuoLin: We all had this similar experience with spending tons of time trying to find a movie, and sometimes we end up choosing one we don’t even like in the end. This kind of interaction that users can have between each other is especially helpful for people that can’t memorize all the recommended movie names. Since the global pandemic, watching movies at home with friends or family has become one of the most popular activities, so we hope our app can make people’s movie nights more enjoyable during this depressing time!

Check out a preview of how MoWe works: