Before A static Home, disconnected from onboarding choices.
Personalised Home
A home that knows you.
Boosting engagement and retention in the crucial first week with personalisation.
MY ROLE
Onboarding personalisation
As one of the main product designers, I focused on personalisation during onboarding. I led hypothesis formation, user testing and design iterations.THE CHALLENGE
Make the first week count
The core value and personalisation were not clear enough during onboarding and initial usage.WEEK 1 RETENTION OVER SIGNUPS
+12%
The opportunity
Make the value clear. From the first visit.
User research and competitive analysis revealed a gap: the core value and personalisation were not effectively presented during onboarding and initial usage. I looked at experiences including Down Dog, Nike Run Club, Headspace, Spotify and FYEO.
Understanding the journey
Personalisation starts before the first recommendation.
I mapped the supporting CRM journey to understand how emails could keep people engaged beyond their first visit and reinforce the value of the product.
Testing the hypothesis
Your choices. Reflected in your Home.
The hypothesis was that categories selected during onboarding would increase week 1 retention and content interaction.
Usability and A/B testing informed a new default personalised screen, reflecting the categories people chose.
Content distribution
For You recommends. Explore helps you discover.
With fellow designers Justyna and Tulio, I explored a Follow-based discovery model. We moved Trending and Latest to Explore and proposed renaming Home to For You: a home for personalised recommendations based on explicit follows.
For YouRecommendations based on your interests.
ExploreA destination for broader discovery.
FollowingExplicit interests help guide recommendations.
Exploring the alternatives
Work with people’s mental models.
Each designer created wireframes around their proposed solution. Testing revealed a clear separation between recommendations for me and discovering content with Blinkist.
I used the distinction between “I control” and “Blinkist does the work for me” to shape the experience.
Connecting research and data
From onboarding choices to customer profiles.
I used proto customer profiles to map key drivers and product benefits from onboarding selections. BI paired these profiles with data to understand user interests in more detail and inform the personalisation algorithm.
Before and after
A Home that reflects what matters to you.
The static Home did not reflect interests selected during onboarding. For You brings those choices into the experience, with a pinned categories-you-follow section for easy management.
After Personalised content and visible control over followed categories.
A more personal start. A stronger first week.
Users understood the distinct roles of For You and Explore, recognised the connection to their onboarding choices and appreciated control over their interests.
The new For You experience, including my proposal, the IA change and personalisation, rolled out to new users. The next direction was to introduce taste breakers and build on ongoing segmentation work.
Week 1 retention over signups
Yearly conversion rate
Week 1 retention
