Product Design at Tumblr
I joined Tumblr the week they removed explicit content, so I you could say I jumped into the deep end. My time at tumblr was a rollercoaster in every way, giving me some incredible opportunities to understand it’s dynamic and young user base. Bridging a legacy code base while updating tumblr’s user experience to be more current, I leveraged user experience research along with our KPI and quantitative data to make informed scalable design updates. I completely redesigned the on-boarding experience, building on research and feedback from users, along with a thorough audit of competitive products. In addition to focussing on new users, I reimagined the content exploration experience, and designed a new curated content experience called Hubs. I also worked on a new fandom experience as part of the Tumblr hackday. Being the senior most designer on staff, I also helped improve the the efficiency of our team by introducing user experience research throughout the design process, encouraging rapid iteration, and helping design a jira -based ticketing system focussing on the product design team’s unique needs, to foster transparency and collaboration with non-design stakeholders.
New User Onboarding
Improving the on-boarding experience for new users was essential to maintain user acquisition rates after the removal of explicit content. I updated the entire experience after conducting a through audit of competitive products, a user experience study with a range of users, prototyping and a/b testing various approaches, and introducing educational modules to improve the first experience of tumblr by users.
Old on-boarding flow
Updating legacy experiences
Our legacy on-boarding had a lot of room for improvement, starting with outdated topics last updated in 2016, a text heavy, pill-based topic experience, and a confusing oversaturated dashboard bombarding new users with posts, platform education, and CTAs to create content. I conducted a thorough audit, data study and user tests, and led a redesign informed by both the quantitative and qualitative data.
I wanted to focus on simplifying and streamlining new user’s first experience of Tumblr, while supporting power users who wanted to customize and curate this experience right away. I worked with our product team to triage the potential updates, and designed flows that we A/B tested with our actual users before committing to final designs. We also conducted a thorough accessibility audit at this time, improving support for e-readers, and low-contrast visibility impaired users.
The updates are in the product right now, and have already shown impact on improving user engagement.
Breaking the on boarding experience into clearly identifiable steps allowed users to know where they are in the product. Previously, we used a growth hack to get users into the content experience faster, but lost engaged users in the process. Having users register and validated as they onboard allowed us to reduce spam accounts, and ensure our users engage with tumblr through the lens of their topics of interest.
Topic organized by categories
Clustering related topics into categories helped users navigate our rich content ecosystem with ease, but also allowed control and curation.
On tapping, each category card opens to reveal the related topics within it, allowing users to drill down into their specific areas of interest.
Based on our data, users with at least 5 topics had a much better experience. We encouraged users to explore our content ecosystem right from the start with ease.
The topics are hand curated and richly harvested by our talented meme librarians, and is always fresh.
Educating users on the optimal path into tumblr’s rich ecosystem immediately boosted user exploration and meaningful retention rates. It was my goal to design for the long turn resilience of Tumblr’s content experience.
An animated interstitial educates users on Tumblr’s value proposition and provides the optimal path for new users to get the most out of their first experience on the platform.
Lapsed user re-on boarding
A proposal to re-onboard lapsed users, that introduces the newly designed features like hubs, updated blog cards with a focus on content, a brand new list of topics, and a user experience designed to address user concerns and bring back user trust into a beloved product
Content exploration & Community
Tumblr is known for its rich ecosystem of communities and fandoms, but curation has always been user led. We wanted to build a more resilient content exploration experience that built on user curation by building topical spaces for users. Along with the group chat feature, tumblr launched community hubs this fall. Hubs are an endless feed of topical content, bringing together posts, chats, blogs, users, and other premium content like staff created answertimes and premium video. Hubs, along with Explore 2.0 completely changed the content experience on tumblr, responding to frequent user asks.
Topical content is subjective, and it’s hard to predict what you might find in a feed based around topics, making content recommendations tricky. User’s shared frustrations in finding content discovery difficult, outside of user-curated blogs. Sometimes topics age rapidly, making something users are passionate about a week ago, irrelevant the next week, such as TV shows, or politics. Users found it hard to re-connect with their content, or update their content preferences without a lot of friction. With topically curated feeds, users can choose to follow topics across the platform, get CTAs to join chats, discover blogs, and enjoy posts connected to their interests. My goal was to bring agency back to users in how they experience their content on tumblr, while also creating opportunities for safe monetization for our partners.
Users can get a peek into the hub’s contents with the discovery unit. Showing a few posts from the feed, user’s can decide if that’s a topic they find engaging.
Users navigate Hubs through their saved topics. Using a bolder image based card, users can easily recognize and keep track of dynamically changing content.
Designs scale contextually
Explore 2.0
We wanted to completely redesign the content exploration experience, based on user feedback. By introducing a content rabbit-hole to optimization discovery, we increased opportunities to introduce ads. The wireframes focussed on a diversity of content modules to reduce dependency on carousels, while focussing on trending content. I wanted to bring attention to creators by introducing headers populated with user generated content. This incentivized content creation for users by providing venues for content discovery. A constant pain point from creators and users.
The explore experience is currently being developed, and I can’t share much more. I’d be happy to talk through the logic behind these designs.
Tumblr Hack-day
Fandom focussed choose your own adventure in true tumblr fashion exploring existentialism and reality TV in this darkly comedic mini narrative experience. Featuring Tumblr staff favorite Guy Fieri dealing with fading stardom, being a true fan, and knowing the best strombolii in Altoona, PA.
I worked with our copyrighter and marketing teams, leveraging my years of experience teaching and making games, to create a rollicking text adventure with free camera stickers and hidden easter eggs.