UXDi Project 5 “Curiosity.com”
Curiosity Overview
Curiosity is a content management web-based solution that supplies the user with a daily curated digest of five articles “smart memes” that are put together by their in-house team. On top of the daily 5 you can get lost in all the content that is backlogged on their desktop site and access to all the sources that feed the Curiosity world. Some key values that Curiosity offers to their audience are listed below:
- Mobile site, Curiosity App, Desktop site
- 600,000 videos to choose from (Desktop version only)
- 5 daily smart memes
- Short to the point video content that is 5–6 minutes long
- Easy-to-read content with key topics from the movie you just watched
Curiosity Links
https://m.curiosity.com mobile site
Project Overview
For the last project of the class, we worked hand-in-hand with a real world client to help the company solve some of the issues they are having. There was a client brief that our teachers had written up with the client prior to the project start date and they released that document on a Friday to let us do some research on the company over the weekend and get ready for the client meeting Monday morning at 9 o’clock.
Team Members/Time Constraints
For the User Experience Design Project 5, it was a team-based project that our teachers pre-arranged for us. They picked the team members and which real world client we would be working with. My two other teammates were John Wenske and Anna Zulma. With each person bringing a different work experience to the table, we set off to tackle Curiosity issues and provided a different outlook for the client using all of our skills we have learned in the past 8 weeks at GA. Time frame on this project was 3 weeks. In the past, projects ran about 2 weeks long but they haven’t been this big. Additionally, we were instructed to wrap it up with a presentation for the client to go over our findings and redesigns.
Client Brief Meeting
Our team had a great 4 hour meeting with Andy, the director of Curiosity. He had a ton of insightful information to share with us. To start, he gave us a brief overview of the company and how it was started on top of filling us in on how the content is made, marketing strategies and the “Hook” model.
Andy’s Challenges
Curiosity does a lot of things well, but there are some main problems they are having.
- How do we get people to return to Curiosity time and time again?
- We need our subscriber rate to be much higher and make the offering a part of peoples’ daily routine
- We want to break away from our current model and drive user retention up
- We need more front door subscribers than side door casual users
- 80% of user traffic is on Facebook — how can we change that?
As we wound down our meeting, we started to have a good idea of what the next steps would be. Anna set up a great communication method using Slack and Google Drive with Andy and she was more of the point of contact with him.
Hook Model
Andy told us they base a lot of their business strategy off of the hook model so the group started to dig into this first and worked our way through the current offering. After reading for a while on this topic, we started seeing patterns on how the users would not return after using the site. The hook model consist of 4 main parts:
- Triggers: Ex. would be a Facebook post, shared post, emails; really anything that would catch the user’s attention to visit the site
- Action: Ex. would be videos, content, and links to related content
- Rewards: Ex. would be what emotions and feelings I have about what I’ve just learned and whether I want to share it or not.
- Investment: Ex. would be Likes on Facebook and joining the community
After researching this model, we came to the conclusion that Curiosity was hitting most of the topics ok but was not doing a good job with the return investment part.
Current Platforms/ User Testing
We had four people walk through all the platforms back to back. The main overall assessment was they enjoyed all the information but the navigation on all platforms was confusing. This would make them more likely to not return.
New Research “How people learn in the digital age”
Survey
We wanted to know how people learn new information in the digital age, so the first thing we did was put together a 15-question survey touching base on key topics from those listed below. We had about 40 people reply so it was a good pool of information.
- What does the word “curiosity” mean to you?
- What is your favorite way to learn about new information?
- How many times a month do you tend to learn something new from a shared post on Facebook?
- Do you like to share what you have learned on social media or word of mouth?
- Which do you prefer: instant gratification or do you like to dig around even after you’ve found an answer?
Competitor Analysis
The team decided to do some competitor analysis on how other content companies display information to the user and would Curiosity benefit from any of these findings? We threw together some charts showing the value of the information. Most of these sites had a very nice hierarchy of information that would trigger the user, keeping them engaged and causing them to dig more on the site.
Interviews and User Learning Journal
I had about 4 face-to-face interviews with friends and family members on topics about learning. We had lots of key observations and quotes that helped point us in the right direction. On top of that, I had one person keep a learning log for a day and recorded how she learned anything that she didn't know from the day and what her process was to seek out that information.
Quotes and Journal takeaways
- Nowadays I use the internet for all of my research on topics. When I’m at work, we have 4 different database systems we use to help our patients’ needs.
- The subject has to have value to me or serve a purpose, so I feel comfortable sharing it with other people.
- Quest for understanding.
- I like knowing about topics that I find interesting or wish to learn about. It satisfies my curiosity. I like sharing that information with others and having thoughtful discussions because I learn through collaboration.
- Always knowing my outlets of how to seek new information.
- Google is my friend.
With all the research coming to an end, the team felt like we had the problem nailed down and it was time to push forward.
Research Analysis/Synthesis
After we laid all the research observations on the table and start making the affinity boards, the problems and patterns started to show and we could make the problem statement.
Curiosity Problem Statement
The current Curiosity offering is not supplying the user with an easy display of the information. Their “Visual or Text” offerings are lacking a personable experience, which is creating more casual users than subscribers.
Design Statement
Our solution is to provide a fool-proof strategy for Curiosity to quickly engage with the user, hook them into exploring beyond the daily digest by triggers placed in the design, and to have user retention by constantly peaking their interests over a long period of time.
Design for the users
Personas
From all the research, we were able to categorize our target user into three categories.
- Casual: This person is more of the Curiosity main user that visits the site and leaves after they have seen the post on Facebook.
- Subscriber: This person is more of a knowledge-seeker and likes to pass it along to people in their circle.
- Loyalists: This person is a hardcore knowledge know-it-all and loves to be the smartest one in the group.
From these personas, we continued to brainstorm on new design ideas for the mobile interface since that was the section that was getting the most traffic and interaction from the casual user.
Sketching
After we had a couple of ideation sessions with other teams, we had a good understanding of what we needed to redesign and change to hook the user to stay on the site for awhile and turn the casual user into the subscriber user. Site changes are as follows:
- New on-boarding for the app
- New daily 5 smart memes layout
- Content trigger pages more streamline
- User-friendly hierarchy on content pages
- Social offering refresh with newer, updated content
- Access to all platforms from all offerings
On-boarding
For the on-boarding, we made a very simple layout of what Curiosity is and what you will learn from it with changing some of the colors and designs.
5 Daily smart memes
With the daily five, we tried to make it easier to read and have access to the user profiles and company pages. We also changed this page to the new landing page after you have completed the on-boarding.
Content Page
Social Refresh
Access to all platform from all offering
Project Wrap-Up
This project has opened my eyes to see how clients are handling the day-in-day-out business of running a digital content site. There are so many variables that go into running a content digital site and it’s hard to gauge which path you need to go down to generate more users to all the platforms. This project also has shown me that I feel pretty comfortable in my skills as a UX designer to start handling this kind of work now. This will be my last project at General Assembly and I have had the honor of working with my wonderful team members on this project and had a great time learning this new career field with all my classmates. Let’s see what the future brings and how I can make an impact in this community.
