Notes by Austin Pocus

Getting Sorted

I find myself in the wrong "mode" of thinking this morning, and I need to sort out my thoughts.

Right now, I'm fleshing out the first iteration of a personalized homepage on hackernoon.com. A huge part of this is onboarding new users who don't have an account yet, or existing users who don't have any subscriptions yet.

For the purposes of this post, of this chunk of work, we can consider these two use cases the same, since we want to get the user from A to B, in this case from the homepage to the subscription page.

On second thought...is that the most valuable use of time? I mean, the vast majority of our traffic is on the story pages themselves...

Maybe I just create a simple promo, which links to app.hackernoon.com/subscriptions (users who need to sign up will be redirected automatically). I stick that promo at the top and bottom of the default tag list on the homepage, if you don't have any subscriptions or an account.

On the story page, I could then create a separate promo...maybe if you're not signed in, you see a banner below the tags encouraging you to sign up and personalize. If you are signed in, maybe there's an alternative tag design with an "x" or a checkmark next to the tag name on the left or right, and if you hover, it expands to a "Subscribe" button (or "Unsubscribe", if you're already subscribed).

These simple iterations I've listed should get a fair amount of traffic on subscriptions...we'll have to see, once we make these changes, where the numbers go, but I'm fairly certain they'll improve the more we expose this.

Oh, one iteration I missed here, that will probably be in a future version (not this PR): make subscriptions easier to get to! For a logged in user, you really have to hunt to find the subscription link. Managing subscriptions is something you should do daily (ideally), as you read and discover new topics, and get bored with old ones. That list should be highly curated, not "set and forget".

Anyway, getting back to it. I think I've "rubber ducked" here enough, for now.