Hiring assignment - Schmooze
Product Website : https://schmooze.in
Question 1
- Prepare a questionnaire to interview a 23 year old female user on Schmooze from Mumbai.
- Context: She has selected English Entertainment, All the geeky stuff, Dark, and History in her meme vibe. After swiping 20 memes, she has not returned to the app. She was shown 5 memes from each category and liked only 45% of them. Considering that you have access to our database, make necessary data assumptions and design the questionnaire.
- Goal: To get qualitative insights that will help us understand how to improve the meme experience for users like her
Hypothesis that needs to be validated first before moving to interview
- Some version release was being tested and the meme swiping experience in itself was buggy/friction filled. Eg here in this one (happened with me yesterday), irrespective of right or left swipe, the meme expanded instead of getting out of my stack
Validation from data - Check with dev team if there was a deploy at the time of her app experience and also check if other users dropped during that time.
- She just selected random vibes to get her profile started quickly —> low intention/ impatience
Validation from data - Compare her time to complete meme vibe + time to complete profile with the avg time of user cohort that actively engaged with meme feed after successfully setting up the profile.
- She came for matches but didn’t get a match on 20 meme swipes ——> value delivery got delayed
Validation from data - Verify if she got any matches during her meme swipe experience. If she did, how many ? How many did she swipe left and right on?
- She got a match but didn’t understand intuitively the action buttons once matched after swiping and hence left the app due to confusion. Eg here she might wanna snooze but that CTA is not available unless she goes to the bottom of the match profile
Validation with data - How much time did she spend on the match screen ? If it’s greater than an avg time spent on a match screen for left or right swipe, depending on her action, it maybe that she was confused about the CTAs on the match screen.
Did she quit the app after this match ?
- She got matches and understood the CTAs but she didn’t swipe them right ——> match algorithm didn’t work for her
Validation from data - Did she spend time looking at the match profile or just swiped based on the profile photo section? Did she swipe compatibility cards to see which memes helped them match ? Did she swipe photo dump, binge list and playlist ?
- The memes despite her preference didn’t amuse her or the meme experience got boring after 20 swipes
Validation with data :
Did she swipe all 20 memes in one go ?
When in the deck was her first swipe ?
Was there any particular meme category she liked ?
Was there any specific language in which she liked her memes more?
Avg time spent on right swipes vs left swipes?
Any preference for video vs images ?
Any preference for high text or low text memes ?
Did she share the meme with anyone ? If yes, how?
Did she bookmark any meme ?
Did she try to upload any meme ? Was she successful ? If yes, how much time did it take?
Assumptions
I am assuming that there was no buggy version while she was using the app and she had mindfully set her meme vibes while setting her profile.
She swiped all 20 memes in one session.
She understood the interface CTAs and did get matches, though she didn’t engage much with them.
Her time spent on each meme before swiping left or right matched the avg time of an engaged user cohort spent on a meme.
Order of display : Randomly shuffled
First swipe right : The first meme that she swiped right was the 5th meme (Dark category) she encountered. That’s too late in the timeline and her experience might have been bad due to late humour delivery.
| Total | Swiped right | |
| English entertainment | 5 | 3 |
| Geeky stuff | 5 | 1 |
| Dark | 5 | 4 |
| History | 5 | 1 |
Out of the 9 memes she swiped right, 6 were in video format. All the memes were in English.
She didn’t try to upload, share or bookmark any meme.
She got 2 matches but she didn’t schmooze anyone.
She closed the app and hasn’t returned since then.
Interview questions
I would go for an in person interview if possible. The given questions are a rough outline to rely on and depending on the answers given by the interviewee, further questions to dig deep can be asked or tweaked.
All questions to be asked once I have introduced myself, made clear the purpose of the interview and made her comfortable. Can even offer her a snack while we chat to put her to ease so she can give me quality answers.
The structure - First I have tried to understand her, her daily life, her daily context. Then tried to understand her motivations and beliefs about dating apps. Then moved to understanding the place of memes in her life and her existing beliefs about meme sharing. Then moved to understanding her experience with Schmooze and tried to find out why she closed the app.
Tally Link - https://tally.so/r/m6K4je
- What do you do ?
- Imagine there is a documentary film on your life. Tell me how your day looks like in that film ? (using this framing will help her be more thoughtful while she tells about her day )
- On what occasions in a day in that documentary are you using your phone ?
- On which mobile app do you spend most of your time and what do you do on them mostly ? (try to understand her social life on mobile apps)
- What all dating apps are you using ?
- Picture yourself in the documentary again and tell me why do you use dating apps? (try to understand motivation of using dating apps)
- What do you think about dating apps ? (try to find existing beliefs about dating apps )
- Tell me about the last time you had a good experience with a dating app. When was it, why was it good ? (this good experience might have set a benchmark for other dating apps to beat in her mental model now)
- What is your equation with memes ? (understand the meme context in her life)
- Go back in the documentary and see if there are any specific times in your day where you swipe memes? What platform are you using for swiping ?
- When was the last time you shared a meme ? What platform ? Why ?
- What do you like about this meme platform ? (Go deeper to find out the emotions associated with her usage of this platform)
- Why do you think other people share memes ? (understand beliefs about meme sharing)
- When did you first use Schmooze and why ? (understand her Schmooze context and expectations from the app)
- Walk me through the scene in your documentary where you last used Schmooze
- How was the experience ?
- What all things did you do ?
- Describe the memes you saw on Schmooze. Were they funny to you ?
- Why do you think you didn’t share, bookmark or create any meme on Schmooze ?
- Would you go on Schmooze to swipe memes again ? Why ?
- What did you think about the matches you got based on your meme swipes ? (try to understand if the match based on humour worked for her or not. why ?)
- Would you go on Schmooze to find a match again ? Why ?
- Why do you think you haven’t gone back to the app again ?
- Would you recommend Schmooze to your friends ? (to find if she falls in the promotor, passive or detractor cohort)
- At last, is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t?
A lil extra if we have bandwidth
Interviews are more insightful if done while the user is using the product. If we have participants willing to interview with an eye tracking setup, we can get product usage behaviour insights and we can ask interview questions on the usability and experience of the app accordingly on the spot.
We can also get more insights on what really makes a meme likeable and can improve our meme stack accordingly.
Here is a demo of a small pilot I did on Instagram reels during my MSc
Question 2
- Context: As you may be aware, users are periodically active on a dating app. Considering memes are the core of how Schmooze works, design a retention campaign that will keep the users coming back to the app for memes.
- Goal: Explore different ways memes can be used to re-engage the users to drive habit formation
- Guideline: Clearly outline each step of the campaign, pros and cons, and how to ensure the users are not overwhelmed
Step 1: User segmentation
We will segment users on the basis of the meme consumption format. This is because the goals and motivation for each of these actions is different and retention for each user segment will be achieved via different interventions.
- Users who engage by creating memes
They are people who want their memes to go in the public feed and track how the meme is doing on the feed. These users are attaching their ‘sense of self’ to the public meme feed of our app, and hence the value of Schmooze for these users will be very high.
- Users who engage by swiping memes
They are people who swipe memes when they are bored and lonely. They are looking for good humour while they wait for a suitable match to happen. We can retain them through the reward of quality memes and quality people.
- Users who engage by sharing memes
They are people who hit share button every time they chuckle on a good meme. In this segment there will further be a segmentation based on how they share the meme :
- It could be direct messages in app or on other apps.
- It can also be a public post on another social media platform.
Retaining these users will also lead to a viral growth of Schmooze.
- Users who engage by bookmarking memes
They are the hoarders, who are saving memes for apt times for later use. This is good for Schmooze because the more they use Schmooze and bookmark memes, the more the value of Schmooze will increase for them as a user.
Step 2: Prioritise user segments
For each user segment there is a different strategy to increase retention. Launching all the features/strategies at once will overwhelm the users.
So we first put user segments in order of impact they have on Schmooze. Here since we are in the initial phases of growth in India, for me the impact I am considering is a user segment’s ability to acquire new users.
So my user segments on basis of priority, highest to lowest is :
- User who share memes — they directly bring popularity
- Users who create memes —- they put their creation on feed and hence stay retained while creating value for platform. They might also share their memes on other social media platforms to gain popularity
- Users who bookmark memes — they attach value to the platform by hoarding their meme collections. With increased usage, they have higher tendency to stay retained due to increase value attached to the app. They will later at some point share these memes to other people and platforms and bring popularity
- Users who swipe memes — they stay retained for the reward of good humour and good matches and don’t bring much popularity
Step 3: Launch features/strategies based on prioritised segments
In given order of priority above, we will launch each feature one by one. After launch of each feature, metrics will be observed for the respective user segment. Once the metrics are stable, the next feature in pipeline will be released.
Feature rollout in order of priority, highest to lowest:
- For users who share memes - Show people a visualisation of their current share streak on the page where they can take an action to maintain their streak.
Metric to be observed
- Avg number of shares per user - daily and weekly
- Total number of shares on the platform - daily and weekly
- For users who create memes - There is no direct or indirect goal given to the users who creates meme on the platform. They do it by choice. Giving them a performance metric of their meme creation can nudge them to create more, better quality memes
Metric to be observed
-
Avg number of memes created per user - weekly
- Number of user uploaded memes on the platform - daily and weekly
- For users who bookmark memes - Give them the option to categorise their memes so when they come back later they know exactly where to find that one meme whose time has come to shine
Metric to be observed
-
Avg number of bookmarked categories per user
- Avg number of bookmarks per user
- Avg number of shares from bookmarked categories per user
- For users who swipe memes - Give people a visual cue of how many other people could relate to a meme. Being a part of a similar group is an intrinsic need for human beings. This way, while they wait for their reward of another good meme or a good match, their internal itch of belonging to group is being satisfied.
Metric to be observed
- % of right swipes per user - daily and weekly
- % of total right swipes on platform - daily and weekly
Pros
- Meme sharing user segment is being targeted first, so retention of users will help in further acquisition of new users in turn due to network effect
- Improving the bookmarking and creation experience will help in increasing the lifetime value of these users on the app
Cons
- The timeline of the campaign may be long since each feature is launched one by one and some cool off period for metric observations is also needed after each launch
- Since features are designed for behavioural segmented users, each feature will work only for that specific user segment
How not avoid overwhelming of users
- Rolling out feature one by one
- On each feature release, give animated highlight to each feature icon when the user is landing on that feature page for the first time to direct their attention on the feature
- Give the first meme card as a tutorial of new feature when the user first used the app after feature launch (like how its done right now when the user signs up for the first time)