Content you love belongs in your Pocket
Pocket is a free service from Mozilla that makes it easy to discover great content that’s personalized to your interests, and save this content so you can return to it later – on any device, at any time. It’s your one-stop destination for reading engaging content, catching up on your favorite blogs and news sources, and watching videos that you discovered but weren’t in the right place to watch. Now, there’s no longer a reason to worry about finishing up an article before getting to work.
Pocket’s recommendations elevate stories that are worthy of your time and attention – the kind that inform, inspire, entertain, and offer new and unique perspectives. The stories are sourced from a wide and diverse assortment of publications with a track record of trustworthy and accurate coverage. Pocket’s 30+ million global users help guide our curation by pointing us to thought-provoking essays, hidden gems, and fascinating deep-dives from across the web. Editors at Pocket then sift through the most-recommended and most-read stories and handpick the best to share with the wider Pocket and Firefox communities.
Pocket strips away clutter and saves the page in a clean, distraction-free view and lets you access them on the go through the Pocket App.
Allow Pocket users to create lists from their saves and sharing it will bring in new users to Pocket and increase the virality of Pocket’s service.
Currently Pocket is structured very much for individual users and private use. It’s a closed network where users can save articles and sometimes share those. Giving users the ability to curate their saves in the form of lists and then sharing with friends could help turn Pocket into an open network and bring in new users.
Shared lists could become a discovery tool for creators/existing Pocket users and an entry point for new users. We potentially see the following audiences for this feature:
- Authors, content creators, influencers and thought leaders
- Teams (work/college)
- Individuals
Lists aren’t a new concept to Pocket. Collections have become a Pocket product anchoring partnerships with media organizations and authors.
The Problem and Solution
The problem we encountered was a need to organize content. Pocket is a personal experience with each user having a different goal in mind we needed to make sure we had an evergreen solution that can be used by a variety of users for a long period of time.
In order to help make a positive and enjoyable experience for our large user base I created series of prototypes that helped identify whether pocket users wanted to add articles to folders or create reading list. Through user testing we found that Lists were a more familiar experience and aligned closer to a bookmarking experience. Users assumed articles could be added to multiple lists and not in only one folder at a time.
I collaborated with a team of researchers to build prototypes for user sessions. After the sessions were conducted I analyzed the feedback and made adjustments and share updated iterations for our proposed solution.
What I learned throughout this project was the power of user testing using Userzoom. This is a quick solution that can be used if future teams don’t have a large research team due to the analytics it provides after each session.
