Holistic Teams Update

Halftime is an early stage start up that is building a community app for sports fans. The app has a wide range of features ranging from community posts and comments, to highlights and news, to live chats and audio. I was the second full time hire at Halftime and the only designer on the team during my tenure. Below, I will outline my process for introducing a new feature to the app that helped boost our user retention.

Problem

Low User Retention

Goal

Improve user activation, retention, & overall experience

Role

Sole product designer working with two cofounders and three developers

Deliverable

Holistic teams app update

Process

Surveys & Interviews

We had several hypotheses for why user retention was low, our biggest one being that users were having trouble finding content that was relevant to their interests. To validate these hypotheses, I created and sent out surveys that were completed by 180 Halftime users. I then conducted user interviews with the 20 Halftime users that best fit our demographic critieria.

Key Takeaways

Some interesting trends emerged from the surveys and the interviews:

• 60% of surveyed users didn’t find the notifications they were receiving from Halftime to be interesting
• 65% users opened the app specifically to catch up on content related to their favorite team and/or teams
• 70% users interviewed were unaware that each team had its own community feed

New Hypothesis

Thankfully, the qualitative data showed some significant trends and was relatively easy to interpret. If we get users’ favorite team/s and or league/s content in front of them early, then we will retain more users. In the data, we also learned the importance of personalizing notifications.

Halftime vs. Competitive Landscape

The current Halftime app (Image below on far left) featured a basic home feed for our MVP. Users spent 80% of their time in the app here. The feed was sorted by most popular, or latest. After looking at the competitive landscape (Bleacher Report, ESPN, and Yahoo Sports). It was clear that easy access in the home feed to user's favorite teams and leagues was an essential feature for a sports app.

Data

Before implementing a team and league based navigation system into the app, I made sure that Halftime user's current posts could be assigned to a team or league. So I manually checked 100 Halftime user posts to see if the posts' subject matter was team or league specific. Of the 100 posts I checked 99 had content that was either team or league specicic or both.

Scope

It had become clear that this project was going to touch almost every aspect of the app, so full team alignment and buy in was essential. Below is a graphic showing the areas of the product that the project would touch.

Hi Fidelity

The project involved a lot of information architectural changes to the app and a few UI updates. The IA changes were fleshed out in collaboration with the cofounders using miro. Armed with an extensive UI library that I created in figma, it was most economical to jump straight to hi-fidelity design. The first order of business was to create an easily accessible section for user's favorite teams and leagues in the home feed a la ESPN, Bleacher Report etc (pictured to the far left).

Post Creation Updates

Next we needed to get users to create posts for their favorite teams and leagues. Users were already doing this, but we needed to make sure that this new feature had a high adoption rate or the content categories would show little content. How do we ensure users tag their posts properly? I proposed to force a choice for users when creating a post. The team agreed but with the caveat that we would closely monitor the post conversion rate for drop off.

Shipped Design

The video below shows the shipped design live in the app. The project was released in a few different stages but ultimately proved to greatly increase user retention and engagement.