01 / The Problem

Everything was there. That was the problem.

• content from people and lists you followed
• recommendations
• your own content
• discovery
• search
• topics and filters
• different types of content
• horizontal and vertical scrolling

The Lysts homepage had grown into a place where users could do almost everything at once.

Nothing was necessarily wrong with any individual feature.

The problem was how they all worked together. Especially for users entering app for the first time. For them, seeing screen with multiple actions potentially can only leave question:

“What am I supposed to do here?”

Lysts was built around a simple idea:

Find recommendations. Save them. Build your own lists.

But the homepage wasn’t really teaching that idea. It was trying to expose the whole product instead.

02 / The Hypothesis

What if the homepage didn’t have to do everything?

I believed users would have a better experience if we separated two fundamentally different behaviors:

1. Consumption — seeing things from people and lists you already care about.

2. Discovery — finding everything else.

Instead of presenting both at the same time, we could give each one a clear place.

The hypothesis was simple:

If we make Home focused and predictable, users can understand it faster and discover the rest of Lysts when they’re ready.

03 / The Decision

Home for what you follow. Explore for everything else.

I proposed splitting the existing homepage into two experiences.

Home = Consumption

A focused feed built primarily around:

• people you follow
• lists you follow
• creators you follow
• recommendations introduced gradually

Recommendations were still present, but deliberately limited — roughly every third post.

The goal wasn’t to remove discovery.

It was to stop discovery from taking over the homepage.

Explore = Discovery

Everything designed for discovery moved here:

• recommendations
• other posters and listers
• search
• topics
• filters
• global discovery
• content you aren’t already connected to

This gave each surface a clear purpose.

04 / Progressive Experience

Teach the product gradually

Instead of throwing every content type at a new user, the experience could introduce Lysts progressively.

A user could start by seeing popular lists.

As they interacted with the product, listers could become more relevant.

Then individual items and other types of content could be introduced based on how they used the platform.

The idea was to let the product learn from the user while teaching the user how the product works.

This wasn’t just a visual change.

It changed how the homepage and recommendation system worked together.

05 / The New Experience

Home became simpler.

Instead of asking users to understand the entire Lysts ecosystem, it gave them one primary thing to do:

consume content relevant to them.

Then, when they wanted something else, Explore was there.

This also gave us a much clearer foundation for gradually introducing new types of content instead of presenting everything immediately.

The goal wasn’t simply:

“Show more relevant content.”

It was:

“Show the right amount of the right content at the right stage of the user’s experience.”

That distinction mattered.

06 / Outcome

The numbers moved. But they weren’t proof.

After the new homepage launched, Google Analytics showed significant increases across several engagement metrics compared with the previous measurement period.

There were also increases in views and engagement events.

But I couldn’t attribute the movement entirely to the homepage.

+69.7%

Engaged sessions per active user

+115.8%

Average engagement time per session

+253.3%

Average engagement time per active user

The homepage didn’t need more content. It needed a clearer job.

Marketing campaigns were running throughout this period, and the dataset also contained a significant number of fake users generated by an external marketing agency. That made it difficult to establish a clean before/after causal relationship.

There was another important limitation:

At this point, we didn’t yet have detailed product analytics or event-level tracking.

Most of the analysis was based on Google Analytics rather than a properly instrumented product funnel.

So I treated the results as a strong signal, not proof.

It’s easy to solve a growing product by adding more:

More content.
More recommendations.
More features.
More ways to explore.

But sometimes the better product decision is to take things away.

The biggest change wasn’t a new UI component.

It was deciding that Home and Explore shouldn’t try to solve the same problem.

Once that distinction was clear, the information architecture, recommendation strategy and user journey became much easier to design around.

01 / The Problem

Despite downloads, many never reached the Aha moment.

Before users could see a single list, they had to work their way through a long onboarding process. Security requirements, verification steps, and mandatory setup screens stood between users and the reason they downloaded the app in the first place.

1. SMS verification frequently failed.
2. Mandatory setup steps delayed access.
3. Introductory screens provided little value.
4. Users did not know how much onboarding remained.
5. Too much time passed before users reached product value.

03 / The Hypothesis

A Theory Worth Testing

My hypothesis was that users weren’t rejecting the platform, they simply weren’t reaching the moment where its value became clear. If we could reduce the path to first value, more users would continue into the experience.

The AHA moment happened when users discovered a list that resonated with them or realized they could start building their own. Unfortunately, onboarding was asking users to solve problems they didn’t come for (verification, setup, and configuration) before they could experience the reason they downloaded the app in the first place.

04 / The Decision

The Simplest Solution

Instead of optimizing individual screens, I redesigned the entire activation path around one principle: reduce the time between install and the first moment users could actually see and understand the product.

Strategy

• Reduce the number of steps from 8 → 3
• Remove SMS verification and rely on Google / Apple verification
• Keep email / password only for existing accounts
• Ask only for a username, then defer everything else until users experience value

06 / Guardrails

What Needed to Happen

Success would be if:

I setup clear goals, if users completing onboarding

• Smaller gap between installs and new users with 1st homepage view, not less than 40% in first month.
• Also, we wanted to monitor active users and see if their activity went up after this changes, altho we knew we have to fix more issues in post-signup flow first.

Metric were defined sole by comparing effects we would get from campaigns.

Flop would be if:

On the other hand, killing the test would happened if we did not see any changes in downloads vs new users who saw the homepage gap grater than 10%. Gap was big and we knew it can be smaller.

If users continued abandoning before reaching the homepage In that scenario, the root cause would likely be elsewhere and we would do more live user testing.

07 / The Outcome

Success!

New users increased

Month over month on New users who saw homepage increased by almost 36%

Active users increase

Active users increased by 13.0%.

Compact onboarding

The onboarding journey was reduced from approximately 8 screens to 3. The results supported the original hypothesis: reducing activation friction helped more users reach the product experience.