Leagues & Teams Update

Halftime was a community app for sports fans. Think Reddit or Twitter but for sports fans only. Below, I have outlined my process for how I restructured user generated content in the app to be based on teams and leagues to boost user retention.

Problem

High churn rate amongst new users and low user retention across the board

Goal

Improve user activation, retention, & overall experience

Role

Sole product designer working with two cofounders and three developers

Outcome

Improvement in Day-1, Day-7, and Day-30 churn rates

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 churned users. I then conducted user interviews with the 20 churned users that best fit our demographic criteria.

Key Takeaways

60% of surveyed users didn’t find the notifications they were receiving from Halftime to be relevant
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

Hypothesis

Thankfully, the qualitative data showed some significant trends and was 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. Additionally, we discovered that tailoring notifications to align with users' specific interests should be a priority.

Halftime vs. Competitors

The current Halftime app (Image below on far left) featured a basic home feed. Users spent 80% of their time in the app here. The feed was initially organized by popularity or recency. However, after analyzing competitors like Bleacher Report, ESPN, and Yahoo Sports, it became evident that integrating users' favorite teams and leagues directly into the home feed was essential for a sports app.

Scope

Recognizing the project's extensive impact on the app, it was crucial to ensure that the entire team was aligned and committed. The graphic below illustrates the various components of the product that were influenced by this project.

Hi Fidelity

The project required significant changes to the app's information architecture and some updates to the user interface. These architectural adjustments were developed collaboratively 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.

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

As you'll see in the video below, the project touched so many different points in the app. The project was released in a few different stages but ultimately lead to significant improvements in Day-1, Day-7, and Day-30 churn rates and improved user retention across the board.

Go to next project: Aaptiv >