Hi! Welcome to the first episode of the UX Teardown Series! It is a new side project I am starting. The goal is to try out an app/website (good or bad) for a week and analyze the app from a user experience perspective. I’m using this blog to encourage myself to not only explore new products out there, but also as a way to train my UX sense. In each teardown, I will focus on everything that is related to user experience: from onboarding, to content, to retention and engagement. To see things in a broader context, I might also comment on the business strategy or product decisions.
Yarn
The first app I’m going to do a UX teardown on is called “Yarn”. It is a chat-based fiction that features very short stories in chat format.
Onboarding
In my opinion, Yarn executed a very effective onboarding method —which is almost no onboarding at all. Perhaps because there is essentially nothing new to learn about. Other than ‘tap anywhere to continue reading’, Yarn throws the users directly in the first story as soon as they open the app. The stories (messages) are also very well crafted that it doesn’t take long for readers to understand what is happening.
Chat-based Interaction
Yarn does a good job in immersing the users in the text stories, as one of the main selling points for Yarn is letting the users “snoop through people’s conversations and not feel guilty for it.” The micro-interactions feel quite flawless in Yarn. Sometimes in order to create suspense, Yarn will even mimic the “someone is typing…” animation just like text messaging in the real world.
Business Model
Like many story apps, Yarn has a free account and a premier account (which is subscription based). For free account users, they have to wait 25 minutes for each episode (typically consumed in a minute). With subscription, users are able to skip the wait and also see the images that are originally locked for free users. Paid users are also able to view all stories and skip around. In my opinion, most users are probably going to wait the 25 minutes and just enjoy the bite-sized reading (after all, that’s the whole point of this app). Only those who like to binge-read are going to subscribe, but they are more likely to just find some novel websites to binge on.
Flexibility and User Control
Since it is a story app after all, there is not much to control. Unlike a text based game, as a user, you cannot choose your responses. Everything in the app is linear, which makes the app relatively limiting in terms of user engagement and interactivity. The lack of menu makes the navigation very simple (almost non-existent), but as a free user, it is also a little frustrating to not be able to view previous episodes.
Food for Thought
It would be interesting to see different ways of interactions that would involve users doing some sort of meaningful actions to interact with the stories (for example, the users can choose options in terms of what to respond, which would in turn affect the results). From a business or development perspective, that might add quite a lot to the complexity of the system and dilute the main focus of the app — which is bite-sized entertainment. But in order to stand out from dozens of chat-based stories already in the market, Yarn perhaps have to find some additional elements that is more unique.
All screenshots taken from Yarn (Science Mobile, LLC).
That’s it for this week’s teardown! Thank you for reading. Please feel free to share it and leave a comment. If you have any teardown requests, I would love to hear them as well! See you next time!
Edit 1. Fixed typos and grammatical mistakes. Shoutout to Sreeja Balachandran!
