Shorts
Create a feel-good daily learning habit that’s easy to stick with
Team
1 Product Manager
1 User Researcher
1 iOS Engineer
1 Android Engineer
1 Backend Engineer
1 QA
2 Content Specialists
2 Brand/Motion Designers
1 Product Design Intern
and me (Product Designer)
My responsibilities
strategy
market research
information architecture
prototyping
interface + experience
testing
iterations
mentoring our intern designer
Timeline
4 months, 2024
Problem
Blinkist users don’t engage with the app in a meaningful way every day.
HOW MIGHT WE create a learning experience that makes people want to engage with it everyday?
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.