Shorts
How to create a feel-good learning habit that’s easy to stick with every day
Blinkist
mobile app
B2C
Where did this come from?
Blinkist users don’t engage with the app in a meaningful way every day. We wanted to find a way to make the content engaging enough to really make using the app a daily habit.
The outcome
3.5 pp increase in content active rate by activating users who otherwise would not engage with any other content.
HOW MIGHT WE
create a learning experience that makes people want to engage with it everyday?
Problem
How to create a learning experience that's engaging enough to use daily? That's what my team and I asked ourselves in early 2024. The audio summaries Blinkist offers let you grasp the key insights from non-fiction books in ~15mins. This is something you can listen to from time to time, maybe even binge-listen, but it’s not easy to create a habit that needs your engagement 15 mins every day. In a longitudinal study over the span of a year we learned that subscribers have a hard time using the app often enough to stay engaged for a long time, especially when their lives get more stressful. They would still do their Duolingo lesson, but they would abandon Blinkist.
A glimpse into the study:
From a doc written in Confluence by my research colleagues in 2023
Metrics
We focused on the engagement with the Blinkist mobile app because data showed us the more engaged users are, the more likely they keep their subscription.
Our main metric: Increase content active rate, increase weekly active users (WAU)
Side metrics: Increase of daily active users (DAU), general engagement rate uplift (specifically calculated taking the different formats of Blinkist content into account)
Solution
Meet micro learnings you can quickly consume and feel accomplished with. These short lessons needed to be fun and engaging, and at the same time they should be more visual than anything we had before (Blinkist is an audio-first app after all).
We went for an immersive full-screen after I did benchmarking inside social media apps like TikTok. The aim was to take the good from Social Media but leave out the bad.
From the press statement:
Do something great for your brain in just 5 minutes with Shorts.
Every day, zip through 5 new bites of knowledge that impact every area of your personal and professional life. Each micro-quiz, quote, video, and toolkit is made to be enjoyed in about a minute so that they fit anywhere in your day—especially into that part where you might end up in a social media spiral that leaves you feeling sleepier, not smarter.
Shorts make starting a healthy learning habit fun and simple. And because they’re refreshed every 24 hours, there’s always something new to learn. Come and grow your knowledge, bite by healthy bite!
Iterations
Several user interviews, 2 beta tests and 1 bigger AB test were needed to get it right. That being said: We got A LOT of encouraging user feedback throughout the process.
A glimpse into the Figma screens:
Beta test 1
AB test
Outcome
Engagement rate (weekly active users) uplift: 3.5 pp increase in content active rate by activating users who otherwise would not engage with any other content.
We also saw that people using the Shorts feature were constantly active on the app whereas we see weekend drops for using Blinks.