Weekly Goals
Leverage a common gamification pattern to increase weekly engagement
Team
2 Product Managers
(we had a switch inbetween)
1 User Researcher
1 iOS Engineer
1 Android Engineer
1 Backend Engineer
1 QA
1 Data Engineer
and me (Product Designer)
1 Motion Designer
My responsibilities
strategy
market research
information architecture
prototyping
interface + experience
testing
Timeline
2 months, 2023 – 2024
Problem
Blinkist users don’t engage with the app in a meaningful way every day.
HOW MIGHT WE encourage people to create a daily habit of learning?
To solve this, we started to think about gamification tactics, which easily can turn out superficial, but we needed to start somewhere. (I can recommend Yukai Chou's 'Octalysis' book to dive deep.) From research we knew that Blinkist's content is not made to be consumed on a daily basis because each audio snippet (we call it a 'Blink') is ~15 mins. Listening to these is a habit you can keep up for a while, but it's unlikely to stick to it on a daily basis. The proof behind this was a wider study with ~1500 users who mostly said they use Blinkist several times a week, but not daily. We also had evidence that people would like to use it more often. That's why in the product trio (PM, Designer and Dev) we thought about adding a WEEKLY goal, instead of a more common daily goal.
Hypothesis: If people can follow a goal connected to a streak they will use Blinkist more often over a longer period of time. If they do this they create a habit of using Blinkist.
A glimpse into the survey:
From a Typeform survey 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.
Premium users:
Day discovery rate
For You CTR
Day success rate
DAL return rate
Number of sessions per day
Trial users:
Day discovery rate
Same as premium users, plus:
Trial conversion rate
3d7%
Solution
Weekly goals enable you to set up the amount of days you want to use the Blinkist app.
A glimpse into the Figma screens:
light mode + English language
dark mode + German language
I was responsible for the UI and collaborated on the concept of the mascot animations together with our In-House Motion Designer. For the copy I collaborated with our Freelance Copywriter.
About the Weekly Goal mechanics: In case the week is shorter than what users want their goal to be, we adjust the first week's goal to actually be reachable. Say, it's Friday and you set your goal to 5 days, we'd adjust it to 3 days (Fri, Sat + Sun) for week 1, but set your goal to 5 days for the following weeks. Like that we keep the goal realistic and encourage positive emotions. We also added a statistics page to let people know how they're doing. Especially if they see they are in the upper % of users in a specific category, we saw positive emotions.
Left: The Blinkist app adjusts your goal so it's realistic,
right: statistics to inform and encourage people
Iterations
1 qualitative user test for the concept with 2 UI designs, 2 iterations with UI changes (1 before launch, 1 after), 1 first version including streaks (which we decoupled later on as this feature caused confusion. A 'streak' seems to be connected to a daily streak in people's heads. A weekly streak was perceived as odd. We learned that after the launch via Typeform feedback.
A glimpse into the study where I co-wrote the script, conducted half of the interviews and took notes on the others. My PM and me synthesised the results together.
Outcome
Whilst we had big hopes for this feature, we could not see a meaningful increase of the engagement rate (WAU = Weekly Active Users).
Next steps we planned to take:
Include Weekly Goals in app onboarding
Send more sophisticated notifications to remind people of their goal
We couldn't pursue these because of a strategy shift.
