Boosting engagement with a new home screen feature

The scene

Michael Harrower

Head of Product Design · Disciple

Most customers were using a home screen setup that consisted of customisable tiles in a grid layout. They could choose the image, the title and link to almost anywhere in their app. This gave them a lot of control over the other major home screen type (activity feed of posts; similar to big social platforms).

Users of these apps were less engaged in the community (creating posts, commenting, liking, saving things, viewing articles, etc). It was clear that any changes needed to retain what customers loved about this home screen type: the ability for them to carefully curate the member experience from the moment they log in.

Static home screen (most popular)

Activity feed (26% more engagement)

The problem

Customers were using the static home screen type for the control it gave them. Any solution needed to retain that control.

Curating the member experience, having a professional look and having control over the app are all major selling points of the Disciple platform and closely tied to JTBDs identified in research. It made sense that customers wanted to use this home screen type, but those struggling with engagement needed better tools to help them reach their goals.

26%

Engagement gap (static vs dynamic)

Static home screen popularity

↑

Engagement drives customer revenue

The work

My hypothesis was: If the member was presented with dynamic sections alongside the static menu home screen items, they would see new information each time the app is opened, lowering the barrier to find content and therefore leading to an increase in engagement.

Phase 01

Ideas

I collated ideas from customers on interview calls, from colleagues in and outside the product+engineering team.

Given the appetite for the project was relatively small (2 weeks dev team + qa), it was important to find ideas that we thought could be high impact while being easy to implement.

I sketched ideas while discussing them with customers and colleagues.

As usual, ideation became quite broad and included a bunch of things that were too high effort to include in the 2 week sprint. Including a live view of a current livestream, appearing at the top of the home screen when available.

Phase 02

Implementation

We landed on a simple, togglable set of 3 dynamic sections:

• Upcoming events, showing the next event the member has access to first. • Recent posts, acting like the activity feed but in a horizontal scrolling section • My groups, showing all the groups the member has access to.

We had found consistent cadence of events to be tightly linked to community performance in past research, so that's why upcoming events featured first.

The 3 dynamic sections could be toggled on and off by the customer in their dashboard. This gave them control over whether to adopt the feature at all or just in part.

8 variations of the dynamic sections were possible, not including all the customisation possible with the area below the dynamic sections.

Phase 03

Tracking adoption

80% of customers who had access to this feature had adopted it in some way 3 months after it was launched. This is far beyond my expectations and hugely rewarding seeing the feature so heavily used so quickly.

Upcoming events had been adopted by 30.3% of customers. Recent posts 13.8% and My groups 72.4%!

The outcome

80%

Adoption within 3 months

+23%

Engagement increase (static home screens)

+19%

Static home screen engagement

+11%

Event & livestream attendance

80% of customers enabled at least one dynamic element within three months of launch. The engagement gap between static and dynamic home screens narrowed from 26% to 8.7%. The customers with static home screens had embraced the new setup.

What I learned

Fast, pragmatic solutions can still be high impact.

I have some reservations about boiling the project down so much, but it was clear from the result that we provided a lot of value in a very short period.

Great product design ideas can come from anywhere.

We had a whole host of ideas and in the end, the implementation was an amalgamation of thoughts from android devs, customers and CS.

Boosting engagement with a new home screen feature

Customers were using the static home screen type for the control it gave them. Any solution needed to retain that control.

Ideas

Implementation

Tracking adoption

Cross-Platform Design System