How might we design an engaging and educational onboarding experience that connects users to the value of Reddit as soon as possible?
team
Growth
2 designers
Project duration
3 months
Role
Conceptulizing, UI/UX design, Prototyping (Figma, Framer)
Overview
What is Reddit? A place for online discussion? Community? Entertainment? Product reviews? Memes? Cats?
From our research we know that new users are overwhelmed and intimidated when it comes to using Reddit. “What is Reddit for, and how do I use it?”
For 3 months I worked with another designer on Reddit’s Growth team to outline a framework for defining and designing a more comprehensive approach to new user onboarding. We collaborated with UX researchers to test out concepts, and shipped an experiment which showed an increase in week 1 retention and engagement.
Data
Looking at existing data, we knew that new user retention is low at 2.5% after 1 day and 1.7% after 28 days. We also knew that new users who consume more than one post on their first day retain better, and that most post consumes happen on the community page.
However, qualitative research informed us that new users had trouble understanding communities on Reddit. How could we could connect new users find community and belonging on Reddit by helping them discovering content they care about?
Brainstorming
We invited designers, product managers, engineers, and content writers to share their ideas.
Brainstorming Questions
In our workshops, we asked everyone to put themselves into the shoes of a new Reddit user. How might we create a delightful “Reddit 101” experience? What are the “Reddit 101” actions we think new users should know about? What are moments that ooze belonging? How can we connect Redditors who think of Reddit as a utility with our mission of belonging?
How would you explain Reddit to a friend?
Idea sketches
Explorations
The following are a few snapshots of several different concepts, based off the themes that came out of the brainstorm. Since we learned from user research that people didn’t really “get” communities on Reddit, and tried to address that in our explorations.
Topics-based Onboarding
To help people match their interests to Reddit communities, we tried different visual explorations of the community selection screen during onboarding. We highlighted the topic instead of the community, showed content previews, and grouped related communities.
Gamification
Who doesn’t like quizzes? One direction that received a lot of positive feedback from the team was incorporating more interactive elements during onboarding. Here is one of the explorations we did based on the concept of “mad lib community recommendations.”
Tutorial
What would a Reddit tutorial look like? In prior user interviews, people requested a tutorial or explanation of how to use Reddit’s main features. In our brainstorm earlier, we identified voting and commenting as one of the two most important Reddit actions.
Voting Tutorial
Combining tutorial with interest signal
What if we started with the basic unit of action on Reddit…upvote? We know that voting is a core engagement action correlated to retention, yet many users are confused about it. What if we showed users actual Reddit posts and then asked them to upvote or downvote?
Voting tutorial with interest signal gathering
We tested the prototype shown above with 5 participants. All participants left with a clear understanding of upvote/downvote, but they weren’t sure if they were directly influencing their feed experience. This led us to our next iteration where the onboarding tutorial is integrated into the main feed experience itself.
User testing
Learning through Engagement
“I felt like I was kind of present throughout the whole process and it kind of clued you in on how to do things, and you felt kind of empowered to use the app, so I’d say it was very engaging.”
Confusion over Category vs. Individual Posts
“I don’t want to see birds with arms. Now it says I’ll have less of Funny. I thought I was voting on birds with arms, not funny as a whole… Make it clear that we’re voting on category not post.”
In Feed Tutorial
In our next iteration, we showed the tutorial contained within the Reddit home feed. After users selected their broad interests, we would show them posts in subcategories to collect more signal. In addition, we added a gamification element via a progress bar which showed users how close they were to finishing “fine-tuning” their feed. This was the version we chose to ship.
Shipping the experiment
Our key metrics for success were week 1 retention and number of engaging actions, such as voting, commenting, and subscribing to a community. A user’s first successful comment correlates with 83% reddit retention 1 week later, compared to overall commenting correlated with 75% retention. For new users, subscribing to a subreddit is strongly correlated with long term reddit retention
After building the experiment on mobile, we saw the following successful results:
4% lift in week 1 retention
12% lift in engaging actions such as upvotes, 2 second video view, and “good visits”
However, we saw low engagement with the onboarding feature itself. Only 35% of new users decided to interact with the practice feed.
Learnings
Content is king. Rather than trying to recommend the right communities, showing users content directly helps users understand the value of Reddit more quickly and has them coming back more.
Contextual education UI can have significant, lasting impact on user behavior. With this voting education experience, we saw increases in voting and number of sessions with votes. It may be worth exploring having additional guided educational components for other key actions such as commenting in threads.