The problem: Users have trouble finding new communities and interests on Reddit. Because Reddit is made of millions of communities, users often do not discover new communities after their first dozen interests.
Our previous methods of recommending new communities have not worked at all. I was tasked with finding a better method for recommending relevant communities. These recommendations UI are called “discovery unites.”
Below you can see some of the old discovery units that did not work at all.
Understand why these archaic discovery units are not working. They surface the communities we want, but nobody seems to visit them. It seemed as if the users were blind to these traditional discovery units. They simply never touched them.
Multiple rounds of discovery units were crafted before finalists were chosen for both user and AB testing.
To the left are some of the versions that did not make it to testing but influenced later discover units.
I first needed to understand why users are not looking at our discovery units. My first thought came from research. When people scroll downward in a feed UI, they do not tend to also scroll side to side. Many of our in feed discovery units had a horizontal scroll. Users tend to scroll side to side when browsing and searching for something. For example, Netflix has lots of side to side scrolling because the user is looking for a specific show to watch.
Our data did show that users did not scroll side to side but rather skipped our discovery units. However this was not the only problem. We needed to showcase our up and coming communities to our users in a better way. But how? First, I took a look at our competition to see if anyone recommended better than us. It turns out that everyone recommended their products better than us. Having said that, our product is unique and we needed something different. I began to design a series of discovery units to test.
Below are the discovery units that were chosen and tested:
Testing the finalists: We spoke with twenty new users of Reddit to understand which unit was the most effective and the most informative. When conducting this test, we asked wanted to see if users could understand the posts as well as the community the posts belonged to. While getting their opinion of which module they preferred is nice, it was hardly relevant. For understanding the nature of the community as well as which module was noticed most, the community with highlighted posts was the most successful.
Once user testing was over, I actually pushed for each of these to be run as a test on our desktop and iOS platforms. This week long test showed that the most effective module was the community with highlighted posts. Because both our AB testing and user testing aligned, we rolled out the new discover units to the entire fifty two million daily active users and the effects were outstanding.
Testing the finalists: We spoke with twenty new users of Reddit to understand which unit was the most effective and the most informative. When conducting this test, we asked wanted to see if users could understand the posts as well as the community the
Dramatic increases in user interaction were the outcome. While I could make up numbers, I actually do not know the real outcome but it was showcased and adopted through our website, Android & iOS app and even our mobile website which gets a lot of traffic.
I wasn’t done yet. While our new discovery units increased visitors to up and coming communities, I wanted to also increase interaction within those communities. A new thought arrived.
If a user pauses on the discovery unit for a moment, we then promoted an animation to allow the user to comment directly from discovery unit. This is showcased to the left. This not only increased the click through rate of the discovery unit but also allowed for created more engagement through comments.
