Mobile Case Study
Evolving the Podcast Tab
Role: Designer & UX Researcher
Impact: Increased usage from 21% to 27%
The Project
As part of a contract negotiation, we needed to remove the Ten Percent Happier podcast from the Happier Meditation app. Rather then simply remove the podcast, we wanted to use the opportunity to reimagine this tab as a hub for all our short-form content, improving it’s usefulness and evolving it into a retention tool.
The Problem
The Ten Percent Happier podcast had to be removed from the app as a result of a contract negotiation.
Podcasts are not the most popular feature within the app but they’re still pretty widely used: 21% of active subscribers recently played a podcast episode.
There are 5 podcasts housed within the podcast tab but the Ten Percent Happier podcast accounts for 97% of all plays. By removing it, we’d be removing the bulk of the value from this tab for roughly one fifth of our users.
A smaller but not insignificant amount of active subscribers (2.8%) exclusively use our app to listen to the Ten Percent Happier podcast ad-free. These users are likely to cancel their subscription unless we can convert them through other means.
Our plan: Reduce churn and user frustration by replacing the Ten Percent Happier podcast with high-value content that they aren’t able to easily access elsewhere in the app.
The Solution
I only had 2 weeks from the design kickoff (my first week on the job!) to the design handoff so I made the most of this time by meeting with partners across the organization in marketing, content, and customer service to better understand the content we were working with and what the name of this new tab should be.
My Product Manager and I collaborated closely with our content team to repurpose previously recorded videos and worked closely with our developers to maximize our tight scope.
The outcome was a short form content hub that would allow users to quickly and easily access mindfulness lessons without requiring them to sit for a full, focused meditation or course.
We considered several name options for this new tab that would be both descriptive and scalable as new content was added. I ran a series of user studies focused on user comprehension and the name “Shorts” tested the best.
Practice in Action videos were previously created for a meditation challenge but weren’t accessible within the app. This high quality content now has a permanent, easily accessible home.
Wisdom clips are short clips taken from longer course videos. For our V1 launch, we opted to reuse our existing patterns by grouping these into cards, identical to our meditation library, and ordered them based on popularity.
For V2, we pulled these out and added a filtering feature to make them even easier to access. Now users will be able to quickly see all the wisdom clips from their favorite teacher on their topic of choice.
We kept our remaining podcasts within the new tab. For our V3, we wanted to explore the idea of converting the Teacher Talks podcast, which is actually just short form audio clips, into its own section.
Measuring the Impact
Our primary goal was to soften the negative impact of removing the Ten Percent Happier podcast from this tab. For our V1 launch, we wanted to keep tab usage from dipping below 15% of active subscribers. In the first 30 days post-launch, we actually saw an increase in tab usage, up from 21% to 27% of active subscribers.
Our secondary goal was to increase plays for both Practice in Action videos and Wisdom Clips. We saw the number of users who viewed these types of content increase from 28% to 44%.
User Feedback
“I just watched the shorts for the first time. Devon, Pascal
and Jeff were phenominal and affected me so strongly with their sincere thoughts and messages. I hope this means of communication continues. I have always been listening to all three teachers, but these shorts really got to my heart and mind. I feel like I know them more personally now and love them even more than before.”
“I like the new content on the shorts tab. It's a really useful addition to the existing content on the app, and I like the fact that the style [of content] is completely different and complements what's already there.”
The Team ☀️
Product Manager: Eva Breitenbach
Mobile Engineer: Jess Melanson-Thomas
Mobile Engineer: Hector Rodriguez
Media Content: David Hart
Marketing & Copy: Megan Baldwin
Customer Service Partner: Cassidy Stagnitti