In the past few months the constellation team has been doing a lot of strategy work to answer big questions that arise from all the changes. We brought in stakeholders from across the company, so thank you for everyone that participated in our sessions. From that, we've arrived at the following roadmap.
Spinning up more profiles ("hubs")
Objective: Seed behaviour that profiles/hubs are a good way to curate content and build community around areas of interest and provide a base of hubs to promote
Sam has been busy getting Wattpad influencers to create these community profiles and we've already seen 150+ up on Wattpad. We expect to have at least 200 active communities by end of year and many many more in 2016
Revisiting Profile
Objective: Make it easier to get back to a profile you are following to find more content and make the overall content discovery experience on a profile easier.
We are currently in design to continue to update the profile to improve story browsability, signup flows (on web) and make it easier for people to return to profiles they follow. We hope to ship some of these solutions in Q1.
Over time we will be rebranding profiles with a new term (yet to be determined).
New Home Iterations
Objective: Continue to make the discovery experience of content and hubs better (and drive reading time and retention).
At the beginning of Q1 we will be adding in all the promoted units as modules into the new home. We will be continuing to add more module types to home, improve the algorithms within modules and improve the scoring system of the overall ordering and presentation of modules. This iteration will be ongoing into 2016. The goal is to move 100% of users into the new home in Q1.
Content Organization
Objective: Make it easy for the right type of content to get exposed in the right way on the right profiles/hubs.
The plan is to use tags as the main mechanism for writers to categorize their content going forward (since we will be removing categories) and Profiles ("Hubs") as the main way that curators/readers organize content. Both will co-exist. A user can follow a Profile to continue to get updates on it (unlike a tag). This will mean improving tags as follows (Q1):
- Incorporating suggested tags into the writing experience
- Autocomplete of tags
- Improve the flow of adding tags and seeing it's implications
And improving reading lists as follows (Q1) :
- Allowing users to manage the order of lists and order of stories within lists
- Making it easier to create and manage reading list
And connecting profiles/hubs and tags in the following way (Q1):
- Surfacing top profiles/hubs on tag pages
- Surfacing related tags within hubs (e.g. on reading lists)
Through this work, we expect to be able to phase out categories in the second half of 2016.
Surfacing Quality Conversation
Objective: Ensure the profiles are a good place for discussion and community building around different areas of interest that engage people further.
- Adding media to messages on the profile (Q2)
- Adding some type of voting mechanism to messages that allows for the highest quality conversation to surface (Q2)
- Finding ways to aggregates and display messages intelligently so that it doesn't become overwhelmed with noise (Q2)
Through this work, we expect to be able to phase out clubs towards the end of 2016/early 2017.
Search
Objective: When people are searching for topics of interest, surface hubs that have good content that's appropriate (and obvious to the user)
Update the UX for search to show that profiles/hubs have good content in them (Q2)
Improve the profile/hub search to take content and popularity into consideration (Q2)
User Account Management
Objective: Make it easy for curators to manage multiple profiles/hubs
- Users will still have to create multiple accounts to manage multiple hubs, but we will allow for easier switching between accounts (Q3)
A point of clarification: Profiles = Hubs. There is no difference between a hub or a profile. A person can build a community around their own personal brand (e.g. Anna Todd) or around a category (e.g. Zombies). There will be zero difference from a product perspective. Similar to how YouTube optimizes channel management for creators / curators, we will be optimizing in the same way.
Rewarding Curators
Objective: Create more incentives for curators / hub owners to do what they do
- Explore adding voting/liking to reading lists so curators can know exactly how appreciated each reading list is and have a visible reward for it (Q3)
- Show curators metrics around how much reading their profile curation has resulted in (Q3)
As always please feel free to ask me any questions. Please keep in mind that the roadmap is relatively loose right now, particularly as we look at Q2 and Q3. Things evolve as we learn more.
YOU ARE READING
Constellation: The changing shape of Wattpad
Non-FictionThis story will feature both updates as well as strategic discussion about what constellation is all about and how it impacts overall discovery and interaction on Wattpad. Add this to your library to continue to get updates on what's happening.
