Book rating system
How did emojis help to increase 15% monthly user engagement?
Role
Duration
Product Designer
1 to 2 Months
Team
Beek was a small startup of 5 people, 2 founders, 2 engineers and me as the only designer, and 3.000 Beta users.
Context
This project was very special because of the way we developed the research and discovered a better way to rank a book. We discover through research and talking with our users that it’s more personal to find a new book to read based on the feelings you would feel with that book, instead.
We were struggling to improve retention, and we started looking at key actions from our users and asking how we can get more engaged users, so we discovered from surveys and interviews that the users would have a higher probability of getting engaged by discovering their next read.
Skills
Mobile and Web Design
Prototyping and Interaction design
Design sprints methodology
Creative Problem-Solving
Research (User interviews)
Agile Methodologies
🕵️ Understanding the problem
Our problem at that moment was that retention was going down because we didn't provide a real way to engage with the product or a trigger that allowed users to come back over and over to the website. Beek was being used as just a bookshelf, so the user activity was low. Additionally, with research, we found that
· 📚 Book readers want to discover new lectures: the avid readers are constantly looking for new experiences, and one of the main ways to find their next read is by reference from a friend.
· ⭐️ The star rating systems are boring: we discover from the users that they were tired of rating books with the common star rating system because there's no difference between a 3.5 to a 4 rating, and the comments are too ambiguous.
· 😢 Readers have feelings while reading: readers used to have feelings about each book, and the way that they recommend a book to another friend is by the emotions. "I felt anger" or "I felt like I'm in love with that character".
· 🏁 Update their reading progress: another challenge was to find a way for users would keep updating their progress with the emojis, so we developed both the book page with the emoji rating and an updated reading process feature to allow users to track their feelings towards the full book.
🔥 Final experience (Web & Mobile)
Once we decide to give a try to the emoji rating system, we start to create different versions of the current book page to show users the emotions timeline from a given book. We recruit between 5 to 10 users for each session and design the test with:
A 5-second test
First click/view
Eye tracking and reactions.
Open questions.
From there, we iterate a lot to find the right way to show the average rating based on the user’s update progress feature. So we delimit to 5-6 reactions based on the more common users’ feelings.
🔬 Testing with users
