Luis Herrero

Formerly known as iShows, this side project was a pivotal milestone in my career to become a Product Designer.

What began in 2013 as iShows set out to solve a simple pain point: keeping a personal log of watched TV shows and upcoming episodes in a way that felt as engaging as binge-watching itself.

Early tracking apps were functional but lacked personality. Our goals were to:

• Establish an emotional connection through personalization and theming.
• Offer deep customization, allowing users to control layout density and choose between dark or light themes.
• Provide a gesture-driven interface that makes routine tasks, like marking episodes as watched, favoriting shows, and archiving, feel playful rather than tedious.

We conducted empathy interviews with passionate TV enthusiasts to identify friction points, such as losing track of episodes, navigating clunky interfaces, and the lack of aesthetic appeal. From these insights, we defined core journeys and prioritized features accordingly.

In the early stages of development, we tested various layout options, content densities, and gesture patterns designed as shortcuts for power users.

Feedback from beta users was instrumental in refining these gesture interactions, ensuring a balance between discoverability and simplicity.

We were pioneers in introducing features such as dark and light themes (which was notable back in 2013), layout customization (including content density), and many other functionalities.

To ensure seamless backup and consistent cross-device functionality, we integrated Trakt.tv API, enabling users to have their viewing history available everywhere.

On the server side, we developed a custom backend that can handle thousands of requests per minute, optimized with a robust image database asuring that the app was blazing fast, and remained updated almost with no delays.

The release brought dozens of real-world use cases and feature requests. A maintained public forum enabled power users to propose language translations, advanced sorting options, and region specific tweaks, leading to support for 15+ languages and improved UI adjustments.