At the beginning of 2022, we found that “sharing photos to friend’s home screen” types of apps were trending in western countries. Therefore, we wanted to make an experiment to see if the trend could be reproduced in Asian countries.
The user journey was simple, the user had to first connect to a friend on ShowPop, and then they could send photos to their friends’ phone screens by using a widget.
Created a simple and enjoyable life-sharing experience between people and their loved ones.
Of course, our first MVP wasn’t successful. Luckily, we still got almost 200 users to learn some useful feedback through quick interviews and funnel analysis. Here was what we found:
After one week of interviewing and data analysis, we quickly head into our next MVP.Here are the major changes we made and the following results.
In this version, ShowPop users could add new friends simply by sharing the invite link.
Here was the result next week after we released our first MVP.
As we assumed that people were unfamiliar with setting a widget, which led to the main reason for the low widget-setting rate, we revised the widget setting instruction.
As you can see, I used high-fidelity mockups to replace the original simple illustration.
The key to lean UX is failing fast to learn more. In our team, we didn’t look forward to success the very first time, instead, we tried our best to produce an MVP in 1-2 weeks to verify our hypothesis.
As a designer, here was my workflow. We were running on a 1-week sprint, basically, we spend the 1st week developing & designing, and the 2nd week verifying.
To keep track of user experience, I pushed a questionnaire for every new user who had been using ShowPop for at least 1 week. Given that we were going on a 1-week sprint, connecting user feedback weekly was necessary.
I also put an NPS question at the end of the questionnaire to get an overall UX metric.
The reminder would pop up a few seconds after users entered the photo page and had not set up their ShowPop widget yet. The pop-up would not appear again within 24 hours.
User feedback showed us that users really want to have more options other than capturing live photos when sending pictures.
After we released the photo uploading and filtering feature, the proportion of new users sending more than 5 photos a week increased from 21% to 41%.
Text replies may increase users' mental burden just as other social media. Therefore, we let users "reply" to a photo in a more creative way, re-posting.Users could draw, write on the photo they received and sent back to their friends.
Templates helped users to send more self-created content to their friends. Given that most of our users were couples, we designed these templates mostly based on couple scenarios.
Templates that users could write or draw something on were the most popular, such as the writing-note and draw-my-mood template.
The number of users sending more than 5 photos had increased by more than 15% in 1 week after the feature released. Templates gradually became the most popular feature on ShowPop.
Given that we perceived each MVP as an experiment, there must be some failed cases.
To encourage users to send more photos, we tried to give them a funny quote once they sent more than 5 photos.
The number of photos sent increased only slightly, and we found that users were confused and not interested about this feature. Therefore, we removed this feature after few weeks.
Trying to boost week 3 retention, we let the widget grow some moss if the users hadn't sent any photos in 3 weeks, and the user needed to send a photo to clear the moss.
The result was actually not bad. The week 3 retention increased from 14% to 31%, and 61% of users who saw the moss would send photos to clear it.
However, we received many negative comments complaining about why their widgets were covered by some weird moss.
I think there was a simple reason to explain these failed cases:
We made mistakes because we were not designing these features based on user needs, and we were lost in pursuing the OKR numbers.
To fix the issue, there were 2 things that I think we could do better:
