Context
A subscription-based mobile application helps people eliminate sleeping issues.
During a typical user journey on this app, four key actions are taken at the same time each day to regulate their daily routine, better understand what is good for their sleep behavior, and improve it effectively.
Problem Identification and Consequences
From the data, we observed a clear drop in user retention every time some core activities were skipped. It was crucial to maintain all four core activities each day, otherwise most users would stop using the app and soon abandon it.
The biggest problem was in the afternoon activity when users should slowly prepare for the night by writing down and sending away all their worries using a dedicated screen in the app. The app’s goal was to create or improve better habits, which led to better sleep for our users. If they skip part of their daily schedule, the chances of overall improvement decrease significantly. We observed that on the retention graph, where skipping an afternoon activity resulted in a 5% lower D7 retention.
Solution Implementation
First of all, we agreed with the whole team that enhancing this specific part of the user journey was the most important from the product perspective at that time. We then looked carefully at the data we had collected on this one distinct activity. It turned out that while a major number of users had abandoned this particular activity, another group of users was using it heavily.
After a brainstorming session, we came to the conclusion that perhaps some users were not so willing to share their problems but would like to read these coming from the other users to feel less alone and a part of a bigger community that shared the same problem.
The product team suggested an experiment and simply asked those users who sent their worries if they would like to share them anonymously with other users. It turned out that most of them had no problem with this, and other users who could read these worries felt encouraged and started actively using this feature.
Business and Product Gains
Once the feature was implemented, we found that daily usage of that core activity increased by 14%, effectively improving D7 retention. This was very important in finding a product market fit for this app and a lesson learned we could use in the future.
