Shades
Empowering informed engagement through diverse perspectives in news.
Overview
During my internship at Shades, I worked on designing 5 new engagement features for the app to increase user engagement and retention.
What is Shades?
Shades is a news and media app designed to provide multi-perspective news stories and reduce mindless scrolling by empowering users to stay informed on important events and issues.
The Problem
As a new market entrant, Shades faces difficulties of user aquisition and retention. Shades' primary objectives include differentiating itself from established competitors and developing features that foster consistent user engagement.
Research and Analysis
Conduction of competitive analysis and user surveys revealed that users were highly motivated by gamification, specifically by challenges and competitive games. Crucially, users demonstrated a strong preference for platform-specific games, and generic, commonly found game were ignored. Success of sustained engagement stemmed from unique, integrated features that leveraged the platform's own data or theme.
What gamification features will establish consistent user engagement and retention, while also creating a unique value proposition for Shades against competitors?
The Solution
One solution that I designed was a quiz-based game called "Crowd Consensus" where users test their knowledge about popular opinions while learning about various Shades articles. Users answer poll questions about opinions on top articles that week. They will be presented a percentage of agreement or disagreement and be prompted to answer whether they think the real percentage is more or less than that amount.
High Fidelity Prototype
Design System
To better align with the app’s design system, I chose primary colors of vibrant purple and red, with black and white as strong contrasting secondary colors.
User Testing
Question Format
After user testing my mid-fidelity designs, I found that 70% of users had difficulty understanding and answering questions. A few causes of this were:
Questions were difficult to read quickly in the fast-paced quiz environment.
Users were unsure what the red and blue buttons signified.
Distracting elements like the large white square in the center and red streak count.
To address these issues, I simplified the question format by shortening the length of the question and including the percentage in the question itself. To reduce visual clutter, I removed the large white square and moved the streak count to the upper right. To improve readability and clarity, I transformed the buttons into “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”, labeled with “more” and “less”.
Answer Feedback
To maximize user engagement and reinforce learning, I implemented immediate, positive user feedback following each question. The game instantly validates the user's answer (correct/incorrect) and provides a direct link to the related Shades article for deeper exploration.
Rewards and Incentive
User interviews revealed a significant motivation gap, with participants expressing a lack of incentive or consequence tied to gameplay. This feedback confirmed the need to implement a rewards system to establish clear user benefits and encourage long-term engagement.
Takeaways
A key takeaway from this experience was gaining a deeper understanding of the product development process and value of design iteration. As said by Shades CEO Jeff Grimes during one of our conversations, "80% of designs don't get to see a place on the app, but that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't useful, it can inspire the creation of something impactful". This stuck with me becuase it highlighted the importance of being unafraid to experiment and a necessary part of the process is creativity and iteration.
I was also privileged to see my work launch on the Shades app and contribute to the experience of 1,000+ users, contributing my learnings to real-world developments!