Increase in adoption for Alerts for NewsWhip

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About Newswhip.com

NewsWhip provides predictive intelligence for the world’s news and communications professionals. The products tracks content by amount and location of user engagement and also tracks audience interests and changes in interests over time.

Context

NewsWhip launched a feature that would enable their users to set up alerts for their saved searches. These alerts were customisable and would send an email to the user. The alerts can be set up for the any article that is published or most popular articles or when articles reached a user defined custom engagement value. Alerts are also a great way to get a user back into the product.

Problem Statement

Even after 5 months of releasing alerts as a feature in NewsWhip the adoption rate of alerts was at 4%. This was unexpected as Alerts was a feature that was requested by many of our users. Hence the product team concluded that we needed to find the reason for such a low adoption and flow changes that will help increase adoption of the feature.

Success Metric(s) 

  • Adoption rate of alerts increases from 4% to 10%.

User Research

To make sense of where the drop off in the conversion funnel was and back some of the product team assumptions such as 

  • Few users are aware of the the new method of creating alerts. 

  • The need for Alerts arises most commonly when saving a search. 

  • The user need was correctly identified while building alerts

I studied User testing videos created while building the feature, attended Customer Success Training calls and kick off calls, and studied user usage data from google analytics and SQL reports

Mapping User Journey with data

Journey 1 - from a saved search

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Journey 2 - from sidebar

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Identifying jobs to be done

  • As a user I should know when to create an alert for a saved search

  • As a user I should be aware of where to create an alert from

  • As a user I should be aware of how to create an alert

Concept Sketches

Experience flow

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Final Design

Implementation

During implementation we (frontend engineer, product manager and me) were contemplating on how we would show the notification as we needed to show this notification after a user had performed an activity. I was trying to research some ways other SaaS tools had implemented such notifications when I cam across a similar functionality provided by Intercom Product tours.

Upon exploration of the product tours I noticed that the functionality was exactly what we needed and the experience would be 80% close to the solution that was designed.

I pitched this to the team with the following benefits and draw backs

Pro: 

  • Easy to set up and faster go to market

  • Reduce 80 hours of 1 engineer time to 4 hours

  • Forces the user to either dismiss or click on the element giving us the insights we need 

  • Faster validation of assumptions

Cons: 

  • There is latency in event capture which means that we might not be able to fire the event and immediately show the notification. We would like to explore the intercom JavaScript API i.e update tour event call.

After a quick our of discussion our frontend engineer tested this proposal and accepted it for all the benefits mentioned above

Final Experience

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Outcome

Adoption rates have increased from 4% to 34%

Learnings

  • Data driven approach helped identify and validate the problem fast.

  • Quick wire-framing allowed for wider ideation.

  • Adopting a third party tool to validate hypothesis without wasting company resources