What...
Glean discovers the news, apps and events that matter to you. With Glean, you get connected to what you love, and discover things you didn’t even think to look for.
Why...
A self-described smart news reader app. Glean learns what you love and scours the web to find you the most interesting news from the top sites, magazines and blogs.
How...
Using machine learning Glean was created to be a self-learning news reader app. Glean would study what it is you're reading and viewing within the app and curate it's content based around your interests.
Pain Points...
Glean (called Delvv at the time) suffered from a serious sign up/in problem. Aside from a poor visual design, the design made it very unclear what you were doing and what was going to happen next. Using copy like "Delvv In", though clever play on the name at the time, wasn't very straight forward about what was happening. Once past the on-boarding experience they made it very difficult to sign in by having "sign in" be very small at the bottom.
Another pain point for Glean was the use of other platform design patterns. Mobile users get very used to certain design patterns associated with their mobile OS of choice and switching those in and out on opposite platforms can be very confusing for the user. In this case Glean opted to use Android style tabs across both platforms, iOS style over flow menus and a heavy mixture of different icon styles.
My Plan...
Essentially I wanted to create a frictionless sign in/up process and redesign the look and feel of the app to match each Platform while keeping a cohesive overall design.
Signing up and signing in...
Along with a better overall visual design - the user experience was made even better by allowing the user to sign up or in from the initial screen. No more trying to figure out where you had to go to sign up/in. I also suggested adding the option to log in with Google or Facebook - Allowing an even faster sign up/in.
Styling and User experience redesign. Keeping in-line with the platforms the user is using but keeping a cohesive design.
After implementing a more platform reflective design to Glean and reducing the amount of friction the sign up/in process caused Glean saw a huge increase in downloads and a 40% registration increase.