Reply to Comments
Allowing users to reply to comments left on memories had been in the Tinybeans backlog even prior to my joining the team. After spending months building out a new subscription model, the Product and Engineering Teams hoped to increase user engagement by building out this frequently requested feature. From customer support emails, app reviews and user interviews, we’ve often heard that parents who upload memories do a lot of work, but feel they don’t get anything in return. The ability to reply to comments left on their memories opens the door for parents to return to the app to interact with their family and friends without the task of having to post.
Goals
This project aimed to accomplish the following:
- As a business, we want to have feature parity and maintain product market fit among our direct competitors and other social apps
- Increase customer satisfaction (measured through NPS); a number of unsolicited requests for this exact feature have been tracked through Helpscout, so this serves as an opportunity to delight our users with functionality they’ve wanted in the product
- Increase user engagement in the journal with the average number of comments (and replies) per journal per week serving as the key leading indicator
Approach
Tinybeans’ core product, Memories works across multiple platforms—the Android and iOS apps, the web app, and email. Knowing this and understanding the nuances among the different product types and diverse user segments was top of mind when designing this feature. Parents or more specifically, mothers, made up the bulk of our mobile app user base, while older family members (those who followed a Tinybeans journal) primarily used the email and web app products to view and interact with journal memories.
Design
In designing for iOS and Android, I used modularity to create an intentional and contextual commenting experience. See designs with flows and annotations below.
RELEASE
This new feature was released mid-May of 2022 to our iOS audiences. In preparation for the release, I designed the promotional artwork for our various marketing channels.
Challenges
While the design of reply to comments was fairly straightforward, I found the process of documentation and developer handoff to be more difficult. Things like: defining the logic and parameters of when to display the full versus half modal, identifying the appropriate amount of text to be displayed before truncating, and selecting comments to be shown in the memories preview, were finalized after multiple back and forth's among myself, the developers, and the PM.
Next steps
To iterate upon this feature in the future, I’d like to explore various functionalities that are on parity with other social apps but still cater to our parent and grandparent users:
- The ability to collapse a thread; if a comment chain becomes too long, provide the option to truncate the thread to its parent comment—this may prove valuable for loading speeds
- Tagging users in comments and replies; in allowing users to tag others in text, we can also re-evaluate how tagged users are notified
- Allowing followers to directly reply and comment through email notifications