Short summary

CONTEXT

Discover is part of a censorship circumvention platform that helps people access the open internet. It is available in countries with heavy censorship.

Discover is a unique feature that helps people access news content without censorship concerns. It is a decentralized content-sharing platform that is mainly used to share regionally important news by local media organizations in censored geographies.

I spearheaded the project in varying capacities as a designer through different phases and helped drive product strategy from 0 → 1 and accelerate growth by figuring out product market fit.

GOAL

Validate if the Discover feature has any utilitarian value by tracking the rate at which content is searched versus the view and download rate.

We released Discover with the central question: “Can a decentralized content-sharing tool facilitate free speech in censored regions?”

The project was developed in stages.

1. The initial release saw insignificant user engagement. This led us to tweak the feature to adapt to evolving market needs. This involved extensive research to understand user needs, security concerns and product opportunity gaps that other products did not provide.

2. This led us to design Discover such that it addresses a need that is unique to geographies with high censorship, i.e., a lack of access to unbiased news that is regionally important and a safe platform to distribute them without concern of censorship.

3. Developing this feature was mired with all kinds of challenges from - limited funds, to the departure of key people in leadership to next to zero usage. But our research showed a need and we strived to tweak it until we started seeing significant improvement in usage.

OUTCOME

Our year-long endeavour resulted led to an increase in our average daily user engagement to 23%* with an average engagement time of 5:30 min.

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*The platform’s user base at the time was in double-digit million figures.

VERSION 2 /

Updating UX Goals, Challenges & Outcome

1/4 UPDATING DESIGN GOALS

We narrowed our goals into two small actionable items:

(a) Improve usability: fixing the UI issues to reduce the bounce rate and increase platform availability.

(b) Research user needs and design solutions to help them: by using surveys and community outreach to understand the needs, concerns and behaviour.

2/4 CHALLENGES

(Image above) Irrelevant content

3/4 PROCESS

To understand user needs in-depth, we conducted large-scale surveys in combination with analytics

• Tool: We used SurveyMonkey to ask detailed questions like - usage, bandwidth issues, type of content searched for, upload and download preference etc.

• Process: I manually custom coded 30000+ responses by translating them from various languages.

4/4 OUTCOME

1. ~13% jump in daily users:

   We noticed a steady number of users who were using Discover on a daily basis. It was still a minuscule number compared to the DAU for the VPN feature.

2. 30% of our user base used the built-in VPN feature to access censored regional news media from other censored sites.

3. Lack of content creators

   Discover’s initial premise was geared towards empowering citizen journalists in countries with heavy censorship. While it was a novel idea, it was untested and we learnt that users rarely uploaded relevant content due to bandwidth, network and security issues.

   • Our uploads hovered around ~400 unique users a month.

   • In many regions where censorship became rampant, network fluctuations became common and affected platform usage.

   • Alongside, most users didn’t understand the legalities of storing and distributing content that is politically sensitive as the laws are often vague and evolving.

   • Irrelevant content [see image]:

     A lot of the media that got added turned out to be irrelevant/spam and we didn’t yet know how to solve this without us moderating or curating content.

(Below) Screenshots from the second release

Document view screen for desktop and Android (left); Sample Document and Video screen on Android (right)

VERSION 3 /

Pivoting towards a publisher-centric model

Notes from the Unreleased Version - Pivoting, Testing and Outcome

Pivoting design towards a publisher-centric model

Note: In our Version 2 outcome, we noticed that 24% of our users wanted to access censored regional news and we struggled with the lack of relevant content/content creators.

• So we pivoted towards a publisher-centric model to create relevant content and improve our DAU.

  It also helped that during the course of this period, the political climate changed across various parts of the world and as a result, local media houses started closing operations or started looking for new platforms to reach their audience.

• Competitive advantage

  Products like Lantern are technically unique but operate in a saturated market. A feature like Discover was aimed at differentiating it and increasing our premium membership and revenue.

Testing the water: Collaborating with local media houses

• We collaborated with multiple publishing/media houses through our grassroots network.

• Discover lacked key features to do mass upload, distribute, comment etc so our team worked in the backend to upload content. Most of these were in video format.

• This dramatically improved how Discover was perceived among our users and our DAU increased along with the average engagement time.

Outcome:

Summary from our interview with publishers.
They liked:

1. That a feature like Discover cannot be taken down.

2. It allowed freedom of the press.

Areas of improvement:

1. They wanted features comparable to Youtube that would allow them to distribute content and engage with the audience effectively.

2. They wanted to access a few meaningful metrics to understand content engagement.

Summary from our survey with users.
They liked:

1. They had an easy and reliable news outlet.

Areas of improvement:

1. They wanted to search for content based on publishers.

2. They wanted an effective mechanism to sort between spam and content added by verified publishers.