Wattpad Homepage Redesign Strategy
Transforming the Global Homepage into a High-Trust Discovery Engine
Vision
To move the Wattpad Homepage from a "perceived advertising space" to a personalized destination that serves the unique interests of 90 million global readers and creators.
Problem Framing: The "Trust Deficit"
The Data: Analytics showed a critically low conversion rate on story clicks from the Home screen.
The Insight: A deep-dive diary study revealed a "Trust Deficit." Users perceived the Home content as "sponsored" or "irrelevant" rather than curated for them.
The Behaviour: Users were bypassing the Homepage entirely, jumping straight to Search. This created a weak top-of-funnel experience, as Search results weren't always optimized for specific and serendipitous discovery.
The Challenge: How Might We make Home a trusted destination where users can find relevant stories and start reading immediately?
Design Strategy: Rebuilding the Funnel
As the Design Leader, I pivoted the strategy from manual curation to Algorithm-First Personalization and overhauled the end-to-end user journey, focusing on four pillars:
Relevancy Over Curation: I shifted the UI to prioritize AI-driven personalized content feeds over static, editorial-led lists. We treated the homepage as a dynamic conversation with the user.
Community-Driven Signals: We surfaced "Social Proof" (likes, reading lists, and community trends) to build immediate credibility for new stories.
Metadata Simplification: We stripped away UI clutter and refined story metadata. By providing only the most "scannable" info, we allowed users to evaluate a story’s fit in seconds rather than minutes.
Modernized Visual Consistency: I led the global design teams in Seoul and Toronto to overhaul our UI components, focusing on a streamlined, modern aesthetic. By enforcing strict adherence to our Design System, we eliminated visual "noise," significantly reduced cognitive load, and built immediate user trust through professional, cohesive design patterns.
Concept: Modern & Flexible Layout
As phase 1 in personalization, I led the design strategy to bring modernity and freshness to the Homepage, ensuring a flexible, adaptive layout for personalized content, starting from onboarding and tracking user behaviours across different user segmentations. This successfully increases user engagement and improves top-of-the-funnel.
Operational Leadership: Global Collaboration & Aligning the "Pods"
This wasn't just a UI change; it was an organizational shift.
Global Creative Leadership (Toronto ↔ Seoul): I orchestrated a unique "Win-Win" collaboration model. I oversaw the Fresh UI Vision from our Korean design team while anchoring the Strategic UX Foundation within the Toronto team. This leveraged the stylistic innovation of the KR team while ensuring the functional integrity and system logic remained rooted in our core user data.
Cross-Functional Synergy: I brought Engineering and Data Science into the core "Pod" from day one. We didn't just design a layout; we designed the logic behind the story-ranking algorithm.
The Pilot: We launched a phased rollout to manage risk across 90M users, using real-time feedback loops to tweak the metadata density and row-ranking logic.
Measurable Business Impact
30% Lift in Story Engagement: Story clicks on web platforms increased by 30% post-launch and over 40% on native apps combined.
North Star Impact: This directly fueled an increase in Total Reading Time, the primary driver for Wattpad’s ad revenue and subscription conversion.
Retention: By fixing the top-of-funnel discovery, we saw a measurable improvement in long-term user retention and "habit-forming" behaviours.
