Houseparty Work Example

Streaks

At Houseparty we work to find interesting and engaging ways to encourage users to have deeper relationships with the people they care about most. We strongly believe that video chat is the best way to communicate when you are physically apart, and we want to facilitate maintaining those relationships by encouraging people to stay in the app for longer. What we lacked was social proof that you and your bestie really do spend hours together just chatting. Enter streaks, something we saw that competitors had, but knew we could make fit our model through rigorous testing.

Hypothesis

A simple in-app reminder of friendship will encourage users to increase and continue their usage of Houseparty. We should aim to increase weekly average users by increasing the number of people who open multiple times a week. The long-term effect of this should increase retention of users with streaks. By increasing multi-day opens we should also have a positive effect on churned users.

Design Solution

Simple/Expressive/Fits In

Both users see an accumulation of the time they spend together. This appears in the most common places in the app. We emphasize the beginning and the possible end of a streak. Because it’s so simple, it’s about fine tuning all these parts.

While this feature isn’t super visual design forward, it was important that the mechanics were fined tuned and tested heavily. We put a lot of effort into observing the patterns of our users to test the windows in which their friendship existed. We couldn’t do a daily test because face to face calling doesn’t really work inside of that paradigm. We A/B tested multiple versions of this feature, testing time; proxied into a score, or in seconds, in minutes and in hours. We tested iconography; an hourglass or different smileys. We tested score; dying instantly after a cutoff time, never dying, or bleeding out exponentially. The amount of testing created a mix-and-match approach, where we should be able to pair the right score, icon, and timing.

Because our demographic was young, we developed a system where it wouldn’t be activated by anything other than time. The flows were simple, and really leaned on our notification system.

In designing it, we wanted to make sure it was unintrusive, but still felt important. The font sizes and shapes that we replicated made this pretty simple. We tried to make it look as much like an emoji as possible, so that it wouldn’t look cluttered as a part of a list. Although we tested it only appearing in lists and user profiles, we needed to make sure the indicator was visible in our primary conversation screen. Users spend over 80% of their time in Houseparty in that screen so it was important we didn’t make a “Power feature” for users who were diving into menus.

The Iconography was determined by what we could send through the notification system. This meant something that could be represented inside of notifications without images, so we settled on ⏱, a symbol of the accumulation of time. Additionally, this creates a sense of urgency and as a desire to “retain” the streak, prompting users to open Houseparty more frequently.