Blinkist Spaces
Blinkist’s first ever social community that already connected over 1 million curious minds
Where did this come from?
User interviews revealed a strong desire to share learnings with family and friends, even those who were not app members. Initial exploration of external sharing transitioned into a deeper need for users to be part of a learning community within the app.
Spaces facilitate seamless content sharing, promote user engagement, and streamline individual title organization.
My role
As the domain lead and part of the squad who deployed the project, I led the product strategy, from vision to discovery to execution.
We've then optimised the feature across mobile and web platforms.
Impact & Results
One year after releasing the MVP:
Approximately 1.50 million spaces created
Connected over 1 million users together
30% relative uplift in W8 retention
8% increase in engagement
How did we get there?
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1.
We used the Hook model to create an engagement loop around sharing and the user need to share learnings with family and friends who were not Blinkist members yet.
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2.
2. We've adopted a discovery approach focusing on fewer but bigger and bolder bets and explored the topic of connecting curious minds in a vision sprint.
We've learned through research that people discover titles through others and are motivated by others' progress. To leverage these connections and drive repeated engagement, we shipped a first version in 6 weeks, allowing users to connect and share their plans.
The goal was to foster interactions among individuals who know each other outside the product while strengthening their connections.
For B2B cases, we've emphasized shared experiences within a similar team and aligned learning goals.
3.
Blinkist Connect
The MVP included the inviter and invitee experience, incorporating a mechanism to recommend titles to each other
Next steps & first results
1. We've integrated the feature into a more holistic experience with the goal to scale and enhance Blinkist Connect, aiming to achieve high user engagement.
We've connected over 100k users after only a few months. The initiative effectively addressed identified user problems and showcased promising signals in terms of marketing and user retention.
2. We’ve evolved the concept to a multiplayer mode as user feedback suggested a desire to connect with more than one person. Through rounds of usability testing and decoupling the technical foundation, Blinkist allowed customers to connect with individuals who were not part of the same plan.
What did we learn?
1.
Many users were not aware of Spaces or didn't understand the feature, despite a well-crafted video explainer.
We improved the Spaces welcome screen, enhancing the video explainer's visibility and adding a clear textual breakdown of the feature's value.
Although this didn't boost Spaces creation, it increased user intent and reduced user feedback about the feature's confusion.
2.
45% of user-generated Spaces lacked recommendations.
We designed an AI recommender that would suggest new titles to add based on the content of the Space. This resulted in a 17% uplift in number of titles added!
We added title suggestions and a call-to-action for adding titles within the Space creation and invite flow.
3.
What else?
We introduced a feedback module with a one-question survey linked to Typeform to continuously improve Spaces.
As a result, we implemented two highly requested features: finished statuses to track content consumption within a Space and reactions with comments for members to provide feedback on recommended titles.
Beyond Spaces
This project started in April 2022 and since then expanded to other features across the product.