YouVersion Community
YouVersion Bible App
This project was completed with Product Manager, Sam Bible, and Product Designer, Jonathan Santiago. The beginning ideation phase was mostly done as a group, while all the UI work is mine.
Oct - Dec 2022
The Vision
The YouVersion Bible app is a global app with millions of active users but an individual user wouldn’t know this by simply using the app. Our current community feature shows the user the activity of their friends. It’s auto-posted and the user gets no say in it. These posts don’t create interaction on the feed but instead users ignore the feature all together.
Our goal was to show users that they aren’t alone so they don’t feel alone.
Dots indicate users active on the app at the time of the screenshot (1-20-23)
People Draw People Closer
Christian community exists outside the app and is naturally happening in churches, small groups, texting group chats and more.
When we asked fellow christians; “when did you most feel spiritually connected?”, most people talked about the christian community that they had experienced.
We have a village
We asked; “How did you first hear about the YouVersion Bible App?”. Over 50% responded by talking about their friends, family and church. This is their community.
And 30% of monthly active users have friends in the app.
So, what’s the problem?
Our community features are broken out in different silos that are totally disconnected experiences.
The Community Feed includes auto-posted app activity of your friends and it doesn’t create interaction between users
Only 3% of users use the plans with friends feature.
My Prayer List is disconnected from the community feature and has had low adoption.
Events and Churches are hard to find in the the app architecture
How can we help users not feel alone in the app, and not be alone in the app?
Through group collaboration and several rounds of ideation, we landed on these four themes as the future vision and direction for the community feature.
Contextual Posting
Post when you want right from where you are in your journey through the app Reading the bible? Share a verse and add your thoughts. Just finished a plan day devotion that really spoke to you? Share the plan day and add your thoughts
The Feed (Circle of Influence)
The feed is made up of posts from your friends, and followings. By eliminating auto-sharing activity from the feed, it will no longer get clogged with uninteresting or posts that don’t warrant engagement
Groups (circle of trust)
Gives users a space to be more vulnerable with specific people. One user said “I wouldn’t share a prayer request to the feed, because I wouldn’t want everyone I’m friends with to see that”
Organizations as Social entities
Organizations would have a profile to share their new content, or other posts in the community feed. The content they publish on the app will also be linked to their profile, allowing users to associate content with a publisher or person which helps them not feel alone in the app. This would also bring churches into user’s community feed.
Benefits
Simple: everything happening in your community is in the community tab
Natural: Share what you want when you want with whom you want
Personal: the content you want to see based on your interests
Growth: YouVersion, pillars, partners
YouVersion Community leads people to experience and create meaningful community. This community is a place with others on the same journey, where I can express who I really am, and where I am loved as I am.
Contextual Posting MVP
First, we had to determine answers to technical constraints and UX
What is a Post? A post is a piece of content with a user created comment.
How does a user post to the feed? Posts are only added to the feed if the users specifically chooses to share. None of the users activity will be share to the feed without the user prompting it to do so. The user will get CTA’s to share their thoughts through their journey through the app. These points include the following:
What does it look like to post from the following places (Bible, Plans, Video, Prayer)?
What’s the difference between posting internally and sharing externally? How do we communicate that to the user?
User Flows
I created a rough user flow of what the current experience is (auto posting to community - not shown) as well as how a user would create a post from different “initial actions”. The goal was to create a consistent system across the different places the user could post while not totally redesigning specific screens.
Define UI
Post CTA: We landed on the paper airplane icon to indicate to the user where they can start creating a post. The paper airplane icon is new to this app, but familiar as it it used to indicate internal sharing in other social apps.
Create a post: Each post type will show the user a preview of the content that will be displayed along with the comment they add to the post. We add slight interaction animations to help guide the user to what they need to do to create a post and to start typing.
Posts: We updated the UI of posts to create consistency across all the post types. We adjusted the post CTAs to increase engagement with the posts
User Testing
We interviewed two internal employees and three user who used the community feature in the last 7 days. In the interview, we asked them about their current experience with the community feature and asked them questions about the the new prototypes.
Some recurring problems we found from these users:
Post vs Share problem - When asked how they would post to community? Most users tapped on a share button instead of post.
Power users understand current work arounds/hacks to post to community
The current action sheet causes confusion and without a a full redesign this problem will be hard to solve
Power users like being able to see their friends activity and check in on friends progress - especially for “Baby Christians”
Some positive highlights
“Right now the community feed is restricted to the persons specific activity that day. I would love to see something developed that would be similar to a text thread or a GroupMe type community.”
“Now I can share in detail what a verse means to me!”
“Ahhhh, I love that!”
In general, users felt positively towards the change
Next Steps
After talking with users we determined the need for onboarding. We needed to come up with a simple way to teach users what post means and how it works. We felt that once this concept in introduced more into the app, users will understand by learning.