Growth Design
Team
Michael Donohoe - Head of Product
Jody Mak - Product & Design Lead
Anup Kaphle - Executive Editor
Anna Rasshivkina - Sr Front End Engineer
Sophie Schmidt - Founder & CEO
The Problem
Design a growth loop that consistently and organically grows our audience.
Context
For context into what Rest of World is, you can read a bit more about it in the Zero-to-One Design case study. Or you could visit the website as well! At restofworld.org.
We were relying on momentary wins in audience growth from buzzy stories. We published more and more stories, but we weren't really seeing steady increases in traffic.
We were a mission-driven startup and our larger goal was to build our audience. This audience was only emerging: an audience wanting to learn more about impact of technology beyond U.S. and Europe. While we had set the goal of audience, there wasn't a product and design strategy to build audience; there was only an editorial strategy.
A year prior to joining Rest of World, I had also taken Reforge's Growth Series course. (Highly recommend! Learned a ton of systems and growth frameworks!)
Constraints
We had no AB testing platforms set up on our site (I wish we did!) so it would be difficult to establish how much more effective new features were against the control experience in a stastistically significant way.
Approach
1. Establish urgency: Why should the organization care about about Growth Design?
2. Descriptive & Predictive Growth: What happened? What will happen?
3. Prescriptive Growth: How do we make it happen?
4) Explore and implement design tactics to drive growth
Designs
"The fastest growing products are better represented as a system of loops, not funnels." - Reforge
Below is a diagram borrowed from Reforge's Growth Series course.
What were Rest of World's loops?
One growth loop for us was the number of newsletter subscribers. It was a metric that was a 'multiplier' of other metrics we cared about.
These were ideas shown in slides as part of a larger deck.
This presentation included:
• Baseline data of our newsletter sign up conversions
• An overview of Growth loop framework
• Examples of growth loops of tech companies from Yelp to Casper to Dropbox
• A forecasting model
• BJ Fogg's Behavioral Model as a lens to encourage the 'Action/Step' we want users to take
• An audit of the article page experience, where most of the traffic was
• What we don't want to do (like pop-ups)
• Initial design explorations
Download the Google Slides here >
Below are designs are for a sticky signup CTA.
The vertical bar above in 'Enter your email ' flashes as an extra indicator/affordance to interact.
Outside of the article page, we also deployed signup modules across the site such as the homepage (below) and dedicated signup pages.
Many of our readers were also off-platform and to meet our audience where they were, we also leveraged the most out of our social media from IG stories to a simple link on Twitter to get readers hooked in.
Results
Rest of World saw a substantial increase in newsletter signups on the story page as a result of this implementation.
The organization has also invested in 2 additional regional newsletters to drive more targeted growth.
Retrospect
If I were to start this project again, I would have advocated more strongly for an AB testing platform to test out different CTAs, copy, designs, and layouts.