Curio is an app designed to help you keep up with the world, screen-free. Hear hand-picked articles from 30+ world leading publications, plus original shows and podcasts.
Goal
Find a way to help new Curio users complete onboarding, listen to some stories and come back to the app for more.
My Role
Re-design the app homepage, test it with users and iterate. Design an onboarding flow to personalise the users experience.
The Result
Subscribers who listened to 1+ track went from around 13% to 20% after launching the onboarding and new homepage.
We found one of the biggest barriers to activating users is that users would sign up for a trial subscription, but then not actually come back and listen to a track. Data was showing us users were only scrolling through 2-3 stories before closing down the app. The learning curve for users to see the potential Curio had to improve their lives was too large.
Hypothesis
You can see here in the current experience, users have to scroll past these big clunky cards to find content to listen to, so we immediately wanted to test a simplified card.
We decided to set some parameters:
Reduce cognitive load where possible.
Do not take popular functionality away from power users, but
re-evaluate each piece of content on the page - does this need to be here?Scrolling vertically encourages greater discovery
When personalising for new users, they prefer to listen to shorter and lighter pieces of content. Show these first.
Along with other changes, we decided to remove the duplication of the publisher name and logo, to only show the logo type. This massively simplified the UI, along with removing any icons or copy which weren’t absolutely necessary. Tags were added to each story, to show more context about it, and to allow users to navigate using the tags.
Story cards were made much smaller, due to the lack of clutter, and users were able to see more content in the same screen space. Users can always tap on stories to see more information, but we wanted to show them the just how vast and exciting the library is, and that it is updated every day.
Onboarding
Simultaneously working with the back-end engineers, we also developed a topic system that used machine learning to ascertain what each story was about and assign each one a topic.
Users can now tell us which topics they are interested in and get personalised recommendations in the top section of the homepage.
