The social experiment
Role
Lead product designer
Platforms
Web
Timeline
March 2023
For the biz
To ignite fresh thinking, the CEO proposed doing 2-week “innovation sprints,” where teams pause their regular work to build something entirely new and push the boundaries. My team's theme was Social.
For the user
It’s very difficult to connect with friends, classmates, or teachers on Quizlet to share content and study together.
And so what?
My team designed and built a social feed for a school community to connect and discover content. It was highly ambitious – in just a few weeks, we shipped a prototype to 5 schools that showed promising metrics.
Building a social network
Studying has a large social component to it, and Quizlet users are largely finding ways to do this offline. How can we promote this activity on platform? We synthesized the research into two main user jobs:
(1) Find quality study content, so I can make sure I'm spending my time effectively, studying accurate and comprehensive material.
(2) Stay motivated, so I can keep making progress toward my learning goal, like acing my next exam.
We quickly converged around the opportunity we wanted to test for the 2-week sprint: A social feed centered around a school that helps students feel less alone and jump into studying quickly.
The atomic unit of the feed
Since content discovery is a key goal, many posts in the feed will feature flashcard sets. I explored different levels of prominence of how to display them in the feed. How much to focus on the content versus the person and the action of studying it?
How can we keep users coming back to the feed?
Mood check-ins
In the spirit of sharing and feeling less alone, select your “mood” for the day and post to the feed. It's a reason to come back to the feed and has another benefit of populating more posts in the feed.
This-or-that questions
Another fun thing that could keep users coming back: every day we would release a new This or That question, and you can only vote once. It’s a small nod to games like Wordle where there’s only one per day.
Increasing opt-in rate from 4 to 20%
Social feeds need people in order to become valuable, but we need to let users have control on how much they want to participate. We decided on having users opt-in to the experience upfront. When opted-in, their study behavior will be automatically posted to the feed. For the sake of the 2-week experiment, this would generate more posts and more data to learn from.
Though modals have high pattern blindness, we wanted to get as many people seeing it as possible. However, right out of the gate, the opt-in rate on this modal was low — 4%.
After some user research, I found out that users can be cagey around showing their real usernames or pictures on Quizlet, so I tried options that bring the choice to stay anonymous more upfront.
Re-launched with this version, and opt-in rate increased from 4% to 20%. Around 80% are still opting for their full name (it is the default option), but having the choice make users more confident.
The impact
59%
of users are engaging with the feed, with the average # of activities per day slightly increasing over 7d.
36%
of users answering 2 or more mood check-ins and polls. They were one of the most popular features!
~1%
Only 1% of users followed someone. Future opportunity area!
While the feature is no longer live due to the high investment it would’ve needed to scale and maintain, it proved to the company that we could rapidly innovate and build. Internally, we got a lot of feedback like this one from the director of finance:
“This beta is freaking awesome. This is far and away the best new product I’ve seen during my time here... singlehandedly turned my perspective on Quizlet around.”
