Holistic 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 the 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 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 Hypothsis

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. We also learned the importance of personalizing notifications.

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 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.

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 touched.

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.

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 proved to greatly increase user retention and engagement.

Go to next project: Aaptiv >