Yahoo App Dark Theme

Turn off the light 😎

A design system built for better communication between designers and developers.

When

August 2018 - 2020

Role

Team

Context

Challenge

In 2018, 7 million users were visiting Yahoo sites every day in Taiwan, but only 1/3 would log in and interact with our services.

Our user studies indicated that a significant proportion of β€œLightweightβ€œ users come to our site to kill time or read news as part of their daily routines, but they did not build a connection with our brand and services.

So we asked…

How might we make Yahoo users' daily routines more meaningful?

We believe that small things like content consuming and checking daily information are important, and each user’s contribution should accumulate into an achievement.

Design

Form user habit with the β€œHook”

We utilized Nir Eyal’s Hook Model to design the user journey, mapping key features with these four steps: Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment to form user habits.

We believe that users will be triggered to understand and experience our product, then take action to receive variable rewards. The sense of accomplishment and fulfillment will motivates users to invest more time in our product and increase their engagement with our core values through the cycle.

Make users feel rewarded

After users receive reward points, they can redeem e-vouchers or physical products. It was the first time we implemented a transaction-like experience in Yahoo's media services. As a result, we dedicated significant effort, involving product managers, operations teams, front-end, and back-end engineers, to complete the redemption flow.

Connect users with our core value

Most of our users only browse in the Home tab and won’t try other features. Therefore, we created the Tasks page to introduce and educate the users on the new features outside of their daily routines.


In the end, the tasks page has the highest click rate among other pages in the Member tab β€” Users consider it their starting point for discovery.

Evaluation

From Data

User engagement stimulated by loyalty rewards program.

  • Login rate increased by 1.75 times.

  • Users who actively engaged with the loyalty program revisit Yahoo App more than 5 days every week.

  • Users’ time-spend doubled in 6 months after the program launched.

From Users

We received positive feedback from user studies in πŸ‡ΉπŸ‡Ό Taipei, πŸ‡­πŸ‡° Hong Kong, πŸ‡¦πŸ‡Ί Sydney, πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ London, and πŸ‡«πŸ‡· Paris.

KEY INSIGHT 1

Users are happy to discover new features through the tasks.

β€œI will do the "Complete an online poll" challenge because it allows me to know the majority's opinion. I can get loyalty points and useful information at the same time.β€œ


β€” Miss Lu, Age 30

KEY INSIGHT 2

Users appreciate the rewards that benefit their daily life.

β€œThe loyalty points are huge motivation! I have coffee and read the article every morning while commute. The challenges encourage me to read more and express my own opinion on Yahoo, and I can get a free coffee.”


β€” Miss Hsieh, Age 34

Influence

From pioneering to a scalable ecosystem

Yahoo Loyalty Rewards Program demonstrated the success of a task-reward system in driving user engagement. Building on it, we expanded the program across multiple Yahoo services to boost cross-platform traffic.

Loyalty Rewards Program in Yahoo Mail Desktop

in Yahoo Shopping App

Global Recognition and Impact

Yahoo loyalty program was chosen as the "Best in user experience" project in the 2019 Tech Pulse (Yahoo's annual tech conference). I presented this project with my design manager at Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA.


I was proud that Taiwan team’s initiative demonstrated a global impact, pushing me to pursue more global-scale projects and collaborations.