Helping users see the impact of their contributions.
In order to help redditors understand more about what posts resonate with people in communities, we gave users and moderators metrics that will help you better understand how your post, or a post in your community, is received.
Role
Senior Product Designer. Worked on bringing creator stats on native platforms. Facilitated research workshops, worked with moderation team to identify metrics to showcase, led user testing and worked with the engineering team to understand technical constraints.
DURATION
6 months
Devices
Native
CHALLENGE
To help users understand how their content is doing on Reddit but also increase contribution on the platform.
Outcome
New search experience for everyone.
This experience has been launched to a 100% of users. The work was featured in AdWeek.
The numbers:
Web:
0.778% increase in post consumes
0.8% increase time on site for 30min sessions
4.3% increase in post sharing per user
Android:
0.224% increase time on site for 30min sessions
2.6% increase is post sharing per user
iOS:
0.294% increase time on site 30min sessions
6.3% increase in post sharing per user
Product Preview
See it live in the Reddit app or on the site.
Design Process
Understanding the problem space.
Up to this point, upvotes, downvotes and comment count were the main indicators of activity on a given post. However, Reddit has many users who just come to consume content without voting or commenting. The team wanted to build a system that captures this activity and help better communicate the scale of reach of Reddit.
From data and user research, we learned that by showing users statistics on their posts would also drive contribution on the platform. The team ran a small experiment that allowed creators of a post and moderators on a community to view its stats.
These would only be available to content creators and moderators of communities where the content gets posted.
View Count
By displaying the view count, my team and I hoped that this would provide feedback to creators on Reddit and also give moderators insights into posts that perform well in their communities. This number reflects the number of unique users who view the post across all platforms
We strongly believe that arming our moderators with this additional information will better assist them in curating, growing, and developing their communities. This was backed up by the research we conducted with moderators across the platform.
Showing post views in the first 48 hours.
Request for more stats from users
After building out the original feature, moderators and users requested more statistics to be added. They wanted to see:
Number of upvotes
Community karma
Total number of shares. This was to help understand other communities on Reddit where the post was doing well
Instead of showing just upvotes, from testing, users preferred seeing the ratio of upvotes vs. downvotes.
Showing karma earned from communities.
Showing total number of shares within Reddit.
Preventing harm
When my team launched this feature, we started to see research come out on how harmful the number of “likes” can be towards users. My wife, who’s a pediatrician also saw this first hand, where her patients as young as 9 complained about not being beautiful enough or wanting to even kill themselves in some cases because of how their posts were perceived on social media platforms.
To address these concerns, I stripped away some features for mobile users. The reason for this was that, the majority of mobile users were users just checking on their posts, while desktop users were mostly moderators, checking to see how posts are doing in their communities.
Original proposed designs.
New design with certain stats stripped away that caused users to keep checking back to see how their post was doing.
Key Learnings.
This whole project started off as a gut feeling that we felt could help users and moderators. After testing and building it out, I realized it sometimes best to work on latency needs of users and help create something that will improve the experience.
