Yahoo Mail Today Tab
Start your day right here
A personalized content hub in the Yahoo Mail App available for 30 international markets in local languages.
When
August 2018 - 2020
Role
Lead designer Interaction Design Visual Design Prototype
Team
1 project manager 4 mobile app developers 2 researchers 1 design manager in Taiwan 1 design director in U.S.
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 “Lightweight“ 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 “Hook”
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 — 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 🇹🇼 Taipei, 🇭🇰 Hong Kong, 🇦🇺 Sydney, 🇬🇧 London, and 🇫🇷 Paris.
KEY INSIGHT 1
Users are happy to discover new features through the tasks.
“I 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.“
— Miss Lu, Age 30
KEY INSIGHT 2
