I led the creation of FANDOM's flagship app—from its conception in February 2017 to its launch on the hard deadline of October 3rd, kicking off the company's New York Comic Con 2017 activities.
After analyzing the market and speaking with stakeholders, I distilled a clear vision for the product: To become the daily destination for entertainment fans with a unique presentation of all perspectives that matter on any given topic, story, or moment. This app was vital in telling FANDOM's story to both users and advertisers, as the company was taking its final steps in transitioning to become a full-fledged media company.
The app had to feel fresh and simple—not getting in the way of the young entertainment fan wanting to know as much as possible about the franchises or titles he/she loves. In the early prototyping phase, I authored and conducted user tests to identify user flow pain points and validate new feature ideas. One of the test participants pointed out that she felt we were pandering to younger people by overusing abbreviations such as "Hot RN," which I found to be both hilarious and a great relief.
The app's seemingly simple flows were made possible by a significant amount of technical back-end work. This work included the association of followed topics with a given user's account, retrieving a list of personalized content for each user, and significant changes to our homegrown push notifications service (if you achieve any meaningful scale, no third-party notification tool will economically make sense for you to use).
Keeping the iOS and Android native app development teams synchronized was also a fun challenge. There were certain things like animated transitions that were so much easier to do on one platform compared to the other and then the tides would turn entirely a couple of tasks later. Given the hard deadline and limited resources, I had to prioritize ruthlessly while always keeping the target user in mind.
The FANDOM flagship app was successfully launched and we have seen healthy, continuous growth in daily active users. We also made substantial improvements based on both user feedback and analyzing event tracking and user retention data. For example, I spotted that users who followed at least one topic, such as Overwatch or Star Wars, in the onboarding flow had double the daily and weekly retention as users who did not, so we immediately released an app update which required users to follow at least one topic and included an A/B test with different variations of the copy instructing users to follow X amount of topics.
More updates to come!
