Driving Engagement Through Rewards

I was given the task to discover a new and innovative solution that would drive engagement and usage to an existing news research platform (NewsLens). The platform was currently being used by Gallup social research panels and engagement was declining. With a small and diverse non-technical team beside me, I consulted with them on possibilities and technical effort, and ultimately defined a new direction to take the platform.

Goals:
The three main goals for this project were to increase usage to the platform, reach a wider audience range, and create additional streams of data collection.

Key Partners:
Senior Research Consultant | Consulting Analysts | Data Engineering | Third Party Developers

A New Look and Feel

The existing flow of the site clear and intuitive, so there was no need to change that structure. We did decide to move forward with a UI a re-brand overhaul. One of the main reasons for this was that a brand update would allow the site to seem more genuine and trustworthy to our users. We would also be able to reflect that brand in any marketing and ad campaigns that we wanted run during the recruitment phase. This re-brand included a new set of colors, fonts and a new logo carefully crafted and selected by me.

The Pitch for Points

Once we had settled on the rebrand, it was time to focus the experience and areas where we could improve that experience for our users. One of the main goals for this project was to increase usage and engagement, so one change that the team made from the previous strategy was to expand the platform and make it publicly available for anyone to participate. From my own experience of interacting with user research tools, and ams relying on high engagement, I proposed that we create an additional experience, where we would give users points for the actions that they take and turn in those points for prizes. The team loved the idea and really believed that it could draw engagement and drive users, so I went forward with defining additions to the sitemap and researched new rewards systems to integrate it into our platform.

Onboarding Users and Guiding the Experience

Because we were expecting additional action from our users and collecting data on those actions, the onboarding process was crucial in informing the users of our expectations for them and allowed them to consent with us having their data. We also incorporated an optional survey into the flow and that allowed us to collect more detailed demographic data on our users. After the onboarding was complete, users were taken to a new dashboard which allowed them to view their actions, points and rewards.

Aligning With our Third Party Development Team

Because I had limited contact with our 3rd party development team, it was crucial that I made sure to put that team in the best position to succeed in developing the screens and functionalities as I intended. I created detailed component docs that showed styling, visuals, functionality, states, and imagery. This document was also helpful in saving time and money because it decreased the chance of me reaching out to the developers, when they had completed their work, to back track and fix inconsistencies that weren’t well communicated initially.

Social Media Marketing

As the site was being developed, the core team was working on recruitment and driving users to the platform. We explored email platforms to allow us to inform users of the daily articles available and when the next rewards were. We also set up social media pages to share content, updates, and to drive organic growth. I worked on all of the visuals for those posts that the team used across platforms. I also created the branding background and logo images for each social media platform.

What I Learned

•The biggest problem that users had was not verifying their emails upon sign up. They would miss that step entirely and receive errors when they would try to log in for the first time. We discovered this issue through user testing and customer support emails. We didn’t have much of a budget to solve the issue so as a quick fix, we shortened up the confirmation message after sign up and made it clear to users that their next step was to verify their email.

•We were ambitious and expected more users, and when I talked to users and they mentioned that they already had go-to news aggregate platforms or that the few topics on our news platform didn’t interest them. Given the time I would put more effort into understanding our users and their current routines and where this experimental platform fits in that routine.

•The project was slated for desktop users because that’s how the site originally functioned. In learning more about users’ behaviors and when and how they interacted with our content, I knew then that mobile should have probably been considered first. Focusing on a mobile solution or going full native mobile app may have improved usage.