Enhancing Dailyhunt’s App Interaction

Tackling low engagement on Dailyhunt by aiming to increase how often and how long occasional users stay. And exploring smart solutions to enhance their experience, focusing on making changes quickly for an overall better user interaction.

Client:

Dailyhunt

Role:

Assistant Product Designer

Year:

2023

The overview

Dailyhunt has 300 million users and offers content in 14 languages.


  • About 30-40% of these users, known as thin users, show low engagement.

    • They primarily interact through notifications.

    • They visit limited news detail pages.


  • To increase engagement, a 2-week sprint was launched.

    • The goal was to increase thin users engagement.

Objective

To come up with quick actionable solutions to increase thin user engagement in Dailyhunt.

Metrics to be tracked

  1. Frequency of visits.


  2. Average time spent

My role & team

The entire project was led by me under the guidance of Sreekanth ( Design Lead ) and Prajwal ( Associate Director - Product ) where I did the following:

  1. Research

  2. UI Design

  3. Testing

  1. Prototyping

  2. Cross Collaboration

  3. Presenting to stakeholders

Solution

Thin users mainly consume news through notifications and seldom visit the app's detail page. When they do, they only stay briefly before leaving the app. Thus our solution was divided into two parts:


  1. Modify push notifications to encourage interaction.


  2. Design a different journey for thin users to encourage exploration after clicking on push notifications.

Disclaimer


These designs are preliminary and subject to further improvement based on testing insights. It's an ongoing project and solutions will be implemented in phases.


Current push notification design

The current push notification often gets lost in the sea of daily notifications due to banner blindness.

Proposed push notification design

In this design, we included a background image and a CTA button to encourage users to click on the notification.

Impact

We conducted an internal beta test and found that the new notification with a CTA resulted in a 24% increase in engagement.

This indicates the need to prioritize CTA-based notifications and find ways to enhance them for better engagement.


Current thin user journey

In the current user journey, thin users click on the notification and land on the article detail page. However, most don't scroll beyond the first section and exit the app.

Proposed thin user journeys

Option A: Feed intervention by landing on the home feed

In this journey the thin user:


  1. Lands directly on to the home feed instead of article detail page.


  2. Sees a different feed card at the top in comparison to a regular user.

This is what the Dailyhunt home feed looks like. Which shows 1.5 cards in the first fold.

Current feed card design

Proposed feed card design

These feed cards will allow thin users to get glimpse of the entire article. Giving them the choice to further explore into the news or browse through the feed to find something relevant.

Impact

These new cards increased average time spent by 18.7%.


Cards with smaller image performed 31% better than cards with larger image.

Proving Feed intervention to be an effective method to increase thin user engagement.


Option B: Introduce a FAB

The FAB (floating action button) encourages users to explore, even if they don't scroll down. Clicking the FAB directs users to a distinctive section to interact with app formats.


User activity helps us understand preferences, enabling us to show more relevant content on the feed and notifications.

Impact

67 % of the users landing on to the detail page interacted with the surprise me button.

This confirmed our hypothesis that a We confirmed that Thin users engage with curiosity-piquing elements. Next, we'll reassess the page the button leads to, to avoid user disappointment.

All the above mentioned MVP designs were narrowed down from a pool of potential solutions after being presented to stakeholders and an in-house usability test.

The Process

Understanding thin user behavior

Dailyhunt has broadly 2 active user base

The thin user


  1. Low app visit frequency.

  2. Have a low average time spent on the app.

  3. Mostly engages with push notification or article detail page of the app.


The heavy user


  1. High app visit frequency.

  2. High average time spent on app.

  3. Engages with different sections and features of the app.


Engagement driving factors:


  1. Relevance: Content must be relevant.

  2. Curiosity: Content must excite users.



Possible reasons for thin user behavior:


  1. Limited personal time.

  2. App's value proposition not compelling.


Assessing relevance:


  1. Measured by time spent on the app.

  2. Users might not spend time due to:

    1. Limited time availability.

    2. Lack of perceived value.


If the cause is limited time, little can be done. But if the cause is lack of value, the potential reason could be:


  1. High effort to explore the app.

  2. Insufficient curiosity to explore.

Research

Due to our tight timeline, we couldn't conduct thorough research. Our focus was on analyzing competitors' push notification and visual engagement strategies.


Post analyzing over 20+ apps these were our observations:


Push Notification


Apps targeting Android 11 or lower allow users to customize push notifications, but apps targeting Android 12 or higher limit customization to promote standardization of all notifications.



Android notification guidelines: Link here


In the previous version, users had more freedom to customize their notifications with any element. However, the latest Android version has added restrictions to ensure consistency across all apps.


After reviewing the previous experiments, we limited our testing to three parameters.


  1. Background image


  1. Background color


  1. CTA



Article Detail Page


After reviewing various competitors, we have identified three techniques to create a visual hook that will engage users.


  1. Feed Intervention: Taking inspiration from a competitor Artifact, the idea is to form a hybrid of both the article detail page and the home feed.


  1. Progressive Disclosure


  1. FAB- Floating action button to enable zone discovery via curiosity.



Design and execution


Push notification


As we discussed earlier, we have developed notification variations based on three parameters.


We compared different variants against the notifications of the most used app and current Dailyhunt notifications, and then narrowed down the variants for experimentation.


New Dh notifications against existing and competitor notifications


Detail page


As discussed earlier we came up with three potential journeys for thin users to increase engagement.



Feed interventions


Users who don't scroll to the bottom of an article miss out on exploring the app. So we decided to follow a Feed Intervention approach. Where thin user directly lands on to the home feed after clicking on notification.


Advantages of home feed:


  1. The app has a topic bar and a bottom bar that are available to facilitate easy exploration of the app.


  1. It's easy to find interesting news articles by browsing through different ones.



Feed Intervention Idea:


  • Offer a different journey for thin users after clicking a notification.

  • Redirect users to the home feed instead of the article detail page.

  • First card in the home feed shows the news article clicked on via notification.

  • Display a short excerpt in the first card for user decision-making.

  • Detail page requires extensive scrolling; feed offers easier exploration.


Constraints and Challenges:


  • First card size set to show at least 30% of the second card without scrolling.

  • Language variations affect space on the card (e.g., longer titles in Malayalam).


Hence we created separate card designs based on:

  • Image size

  • Lines occupied by the title


FAB ( Floating Action Button )


The FAB (floating action button) encourages users to explore, even if they don't scroll down. Clicking the FAB directs users to a distinctive section to interact with app formats. User activity helps us understand preferences, enabling us to show more relevant content on the feed and notifications.


Partial disclosure


Partial Disclosure Technique:


  • Sparks curiosity by revealing only a part of the image.

  • Allows users to decide whether to read the full article.

  • Reduces user effort to explore the app.


Variations:


  1. Swipe Up to Home Feed:


  • Shows both the article and the home feed to prompt action.

  • Scrolling lands users on the home feed for easy article exploration.

  • Designed to be seamless, leveraging users' instinct to scroll from other apps.




  1. Swipe up to go to explore more section:


After swiping up you will land on to explore more page with the top bar gone and turned into a back FAB.





  1. Continue Reading to Detail Page


Clicking on the continue reading button will take you to the detail page of the article.



Key learnings.


  1. It’s important to understand the emotional journey a user undergoes while acting.


  1. Avoid using click-baits to drive curiosity as they can cause more harm than good in the long run.


  1. Prioritizing our designs based on the Effort-to-reward ratio.


  1. When working on a sprint, don’t aim for perfection. Begin with a decent solution and iterate as you progress.


  1. When creating an application that supports multiple languages, it is crucial to take into account all possible scenarios and corner cases.



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