Boosting product adoption by Home Screen redesign
Redesigned Vidcast’s product Home Screen with the goal of boosting product adoption by creating a personalized recommendation algorithm as well as implementing measures to increase viewer-to-creator conversion and support current content creators.
Field
Product Design
Company
Vidcast (part of Cisco)
Problem definition
Vidcast’s low user engagement has been hindering its growth. Users tend to get stuck at the beginning of their adoption journeys as passive consumers, primarily relying on content directly shared by colleagues and not exploring on their own. As Home Screen is the first user touch-point when they open Vidcast, it holds immense potential to enhance the overall user experience with thoughtful design.
Furthermore, despite substantial product growth in terms of features, the home screen hasn’t been updated to reflect these changes and left users to discover these features within the product themselves.
💡 The key questions to solve with Home Screen redesign
How might we transform it into a captivating space filled with engaging content?
What measures can we take to boost product adoption?
How might we increase viewer-to-creator conversion?
How can we support current content creators and help them raise their content’s discoverability?
How should the Home Screen adapt as the user progresses in their adoption journey?
Previous state of Vidcast’s product homescreen
The previous Home Screen featured outdated content, lacked personalized recommendations, and failed to capture users' interest. For instance, it was common for the homepage to offer irrelevant Company Update videos older than 1 year, contributing to a disconnect with users' preferences.
The Design Process
Research
Started by researching the product and current situation via speaking to the Vidcast’s team as well as current Vidcast users to better understand their needs and use cases. Before moving to the next stage, I found answers to questions such as:
💡 Questions that informed my further research and design
Which existing product features can be leveraged and showcased in Home Screen?
What type of content gets published? Are there some patterns? Can we make a generalisation
What types of users are there? What do they want to see?
Identified user personas
Based on my research, I identified the following user personas that the redesign needed to take into account:
How do we want to change their behaviour?
Subsequently, I defined what behaviour change we want to achieve in our users with our redesign and made assumptions about how to get there, which I verified later in the project.
Ideation, design and iteration
Based on research findings, I started to explore feature ideas that would best align with identified user needs and feelings, as well as navigation and layout possibilities, which I later talked about with customers to gather feedback.
Feature ideas
Basic content categories
Based on most commonly published types of content.
Ideas utilizing Vidcast’s integrations and advanced features
Pushing the boundaries of feasibility to come up with innovative ways of boosting user engagement.
This feature exploration served as a basis for further research development, and the features were later iterated upon and refined.
💡 Which features to keep?
When selecting what features to include and which to discard, the key criteria was technical feasibility compared to potential gains and impacts of the feature on user engagement and experience.
Navigation exploration
Navigation Option 1: Content division with category labels, no navigation
The most favourite version among users in research
Navigation Option 2: Content division with category labels, with customisable jump list navigation
Navigation Option 3: No content division, navigation through tabs
💡 Qualitative user research findings
Preferences mostly differ on the fact whether people are looking for specific content, or are open-minded, not pressured by time, and want to just explore
Users who look for specific content prefer tags and categories more than those who don’t.
Users want to see explanation and reasons behind the recommendations
If there are 5-6 labelled content categories, users do not have a strong need for additional top navigation as they can remember what is where.
Conclusion = The best option is dividing content into categories, combined with jump-list navigation in case of 7+ categories. This solution caters to users seeking specific content while also offering benefits to those with a more exploratory mindset.
Layout and styling options
Show More Option - How should the experience look like if users want to see more of the displayed content?
Should the offering on the Home Screen expand, or should it be a separate page?
Content Category Layout - How should a content category look like?
Should all videos receive an equal spotlight? What information about the video should be displayed?
Layout Grid - How should the page be organised?
Is it better to have a fixed grid or mix different layout arrangements?
💡 Qualitative user research findings
Users prefer to have the See More option located on the Home Screen, as it brings less friction than a separate page - they only want to have a brief look, not browse through additional content for too long
Adding more content to the video tile makes it hard for users to skim through the page, so adding there more elements wouldn’t be beneficial
Having content in a more dynamic layout grid increases its perceived attractiveness
Refinement
After user research and review with the product team and engineers, a solid foundation for the Home Screen was established. The next step was to define its behaviour and determine how the Home Screen should adapt to specific user personas. These were the questions I determined as crucial to answer in the following phase:
💡 Refinement questions
How often should we refresh videos on the page?
Once per week, as the majority of companies do not generate content regularly enough to justify a higher update frequency.
Should we still show videos that have already been watched?
No, only videos where the user has watched <50% of it, and <80% for the “Continue watching” section.
Should the size of the company and the number of videos posted per week affect the quantity of displayed content and the refresh rate?
In the future, most likely yes, but not for the 1st release of the new version.
What if there is nothing new to display or not enough content?
Two types of behaviour, based on the category:
The category disappears (in the case of “My teams and spaces”, Tags, “Continue watching” and “Followed creators”)
There are “How to Vidcast” videos from Vidcast offered (in the case of “Recommended for you” and “Trending”)
How to further customise the Home Screen for users at the beginning of their adoption journeys?
The Home Screen of Experienced Content Creator (the last stage of the adoption journey) will serve as our anchor point. Moving backwards in the journey, the feature density on the page will decrease, with increased prominence given to features aiding users in discovering new content, thus giving us data to use for tailored recommendations
Furthermore, the feature list underwent a review, leading to the elimination of a few features due to low feasibility, and replaced by safer bets in directing users towards advancing in their adoption journeys.
Engineering specifications
All additional design documentation for engineers was added, such as:
Final version
This is the new Home Screen in its default version with all of its features:
Results
As the final version is just entering production, there is no live version nor data to verify the design choices yet, however, based on user research calls, we can make a reasonable estimate that thanks to the following features, the redesigned Home Screen will:
