Relaunch Explore Case Study

Shifting the purpose of the Explore surface area to be the predictable place to quickly and easily browse and discover new interests.

Project Synopsis

Introduction

Explore is the surface area that can be found on the second tab of Twitter (behind the Magnifying glass icon). Explore currently is where you can find what's happening within the world. But, we are beginning to see potential in Explore being the place where you can browse, explore, and connect with what's happening within your interests.

My Roles

Product Design Lead

Project Management

Strategy

Partners

Design, Research, Product Management, Data Science, Content Strategy, ML Engineering, Client Engineering.

Timeframe

November 2020 - Present

Process

The Problem

1. Explore is not relevant, nor personalized

Explore surface has been largely focused historically on fulfilling the customer need of discovering what’s happening in the world. And so because of this focus on surfacing content with this mass appeal driven by only the biggest conversations and eventful happenings on Twitter - we have been seeing a potential opportunity on this surface area to be more relevant and personalized to each customer to help them discover new interests on Twitter and deepening current interests.

Explore’s content categorization is unpersonalized, too narrow, and static. The focus on a few generally popular categories like News hurts relevance and isn’t representative of the diversity of content Twitter has to offer. Explore also doesn’t evolve over time to match your changing mood or the customer's particular needs.

"While general information is partially expected for News and Sports users felt the Explore section should be more customized to their interests."
- 2020 Qual Study

Explore screens of today

2. Explore relies heavily on curation

Because Explore today is mostly Events and Trends, Events are heavily curated and Trends are being more and more contextualized also through curation. Also, because we are tagging Events and Trends now with Topic indicators, this also heavily relies on Topic curation and coverage. And so, when a surface area relies so heavily on curation, we are limited in scale and coverage for markets and audiences that do not have a present Curation team.

In English speaking countries, we have less than 20 categories of Topical content, which means even less for non-English speaking countries. And we currently only have curation support for 16 countries (out of over 200 countries that Twitter is available in). Meaning, an entire surface area relying curation can and does create an inequitable experience across markets - especially outside of the US.

"Only 16 countries are supported by Curation out of the over 200 countries that Twitter is available in."
- Curation Specialist

3. Explore is currently duplicating content from Home

Currently, Explore is attempting to solve both the discover and stay informed customer job, when we really should be hyper-focused on the discover job. And we can begin to see the blurred job lines by seeing duplicated content in Explore from Home.

In a qual study done in 2020 on Explore, participants also noticed these overlapping jobs and really expected Explore to show new content that they wouldn’t typically see on their Home timeline.

"I think just showing [me] stuff that people I follow are talking about first - it's kind of hard to say because part of me would want to see that stuff first and then part of me would be like oh, I already saw all that stuff on the feeds, so I wanna see other stuff."
- Research Participant

Left shows Tweets from Interior design Topic. Right also shows Tweets from Interior design Topic.

4. There is no predictable way to discover new interests on Twitter

This last problem to highlight is a larger, overarching problem around interests discovery. Twitter really doesn’t have a predictable way to discover new interests.

After conducting a product audit of all the various discovery surface areas and mechanisms today on Twitter, it was noticed that there are many discovery surface areas, but broken down by content type - Lists, Topics, Communities, Spaces. So, if someone was interested in finding content on a particular interest, they would need to navigate to Lists to find Lists on that interest. Then, navigate to Topics to find Topics on that interest. Then navigate to Communities to connect to a community around that interest, etc.

"Finding and connecting to all that Twitter has to offer within things I'm interested in is a lot of work."
- Partner Interview

Twitter sitemap of today's discovery touch-points, zoomed in on the various discovery surface areas.

Objectives

New Customer Focus

Our focus has shifted to really hone and understand the pain points of our new * light customers. They have historically struggled the most to find the value they’re looking for on Twitter. Every day, we get the opportunity to serve 800K new customers who sign up for Twitter and 450K ‘like new’ customers who never successfully hire us. But, half of new customers don’t return after their first month, with the majority of churn occurring in the first 7 days.

After signing up, 70% of new customers land on an empty Home timeline and half of those customers still have an empty timeline 30 minutes later. And, research tells us, that many new, light & returning customers who do move past the empty Home timeline state are frustrated when Twitter doesn’t reflect their interests and they need more help getting to content that is relevant to them.

Help Wanted Signs

We know customers want a dedicated space for new recommended content, so they can browse what Twitter has to offer. A standalone section within Twitter allows us to optimize the experience for discovery and set expectations that our focus is on information they’ve yet to discover and content they aren’t aware of yet.

Every day, 85M+ customers come to Explore in a discovery mood, with 64M+ coming to Explore and not searching. They’re trying to actively uncover new content on the platform when they’re new to Twitter, bored, procrastinating, or feel their Home timeline is stagnant or doesn’t well cover their interests.

Help me browse what Twitter has to offer
Help me browse content quickly to find my interests
Help me browse when I’m not sure what to search for
Help me find content when my timeline feels stagnant
Help me find content that matches my mood
Help me investigate deeper into an interest
Help me find new content as my interests evolve
Help me find what I might be missing out on (FOMO)

Goal

Create a predictable way to assist our our customers that are new to Twitter by enabling them to browsing all that Twitter has to offer to quickly connect to their interests.

Direction

While other discovery surface areas can remain entry points on their own, Explore can become the primary discovery mechanism for all content types on Twitter.

Twitter sitemap of migrating content from discovery surface areas into Explore.

Approach

We wanted to start this new strategic direction by setting a vision for Explore. This would be a guiding North Star that would inform effort and the product roadmap to come. The process that was followed was to Discover, Concept, Vision.

Discovery

The discovery phase consisted of conducting a variety of exercises that ultimately had an end milestone of 1) a discovery synthesis 2) an Understanding & Alignment workshop with cross-functional partners and stakeholders.

Exercises involved: Research Review, Partner Interviews, Product Audit, Customer Journey Definition, Competitive Audit, Customer Segmentation Identification.

Concept

The concept generation phase consisted of facilitating HMW exercises and generation with cross-functional partners, facilitating ideation workshops that focused on the prioritized HMW set, generating concepts from those ideas, and ultimately had an end milestone of concept evaluations.

Vision

Vision setting came post-concept evaluations. We began to iterate on feedback from those evaluations, begin to craft a narrative and storyboards for a final presentation that would represent our customer's story as they browse and discover on Twitter in their everyday lives.