Funny or Die had not updated their iOS app for many years, and were anxious to re-design it to increase user engagement. I was brought in to create a new user experience for the app, leveraging existing content and allowing for new types of content.

 

Starting with available user data covering several months, I compared that against the existing content and the plans for new content, and began to model user profiles and use cases. After identifying user goals (the strongest being “I want something funny”) and aligning them to business goals (“keep users in the app as long as possible, and expose them to as much content as possible, and get users to return often”), I started working on how to present content to users to satisfy these goals.

 

The solutions were to minimize the content verticals, make the content and interactions as simple as possible, and present additionaland endlessrelevant content immediately inline with the content the user initially chose to view.

 

User engagement, retention, and return frequency metrics have spiked dramatically in the time since the re-design was launched.