Cinetalk - not like other
short news.

The Feature

Latest updates provided by production houses regarding the status of their current projects.

The idea was simple, trending and hyped topics would be on the top (stories with most searches, big budget releases etc.

Rest of the area will be available for general stories. This was beneficial for the user as they immediately knew what is going on in the industry, for the production houses as they are now able to keep the audience engaged on a regular basis.

News was well received feature with over 70% users opened the app navigating to the Cinetalk.

*(App was launched 3-4 weeks ago and had around 300 downloads)

Although the app was new, these metrics were out of ordinary. If the users are opening the news, interacting but not opening any news.

On talking with multiple users and analyzing how they use the feature we found 3 problems

Many users were just scrolling through the home page and not actually opening the news.

Also a 1 of them dropped off as soon as they saw the top story section. Reason - They were a fan of a different star.

Ideation of solution video (this has no sound)

Immediate improvement in the story reads metric.  
From 8 reads/story in 2 weeks to over 20 reads/story in 1 week

Improved engagement time with in the feature.
Avg active session time increased from 10 mins to 12 mins  

This makes ads/promotions viable in the future when the user base increases.

High engagement metrics do not always indicate high content consumption.
Users naturally choose the path that provides maximum information with minimum effort.
Giving users too many navigation choices can increase cognitive effort without increasing discovery.

“Optimizing for a metric (article opens) can lead to the wrong design decisions if it doesn't reflect how users actually derive value from it.”