User Persona for Reddit

TLDR:

I built a user persona for Reddit, leveraging content analysis of app store reviews and Reddit comments to help build empathy with users, find insights to explain decreased user engagement, and suggest next steps.

The full brief for this project is from Uxcel's User Persona for a Social Media App design brief. You can read the full details here.

Research goals:

The main goals for this project were to build empathy with users, to help answer what pain points and frustrations might be contributing to decreased user engagement, and to suggest next steps. Research questions will lean in to answering why engagement is decreasing by identifying pain points and building empathy.

The primary research was done by leveraging secondary research, gathering data from iOS App Store reviews and user comments on Reddit. A content analysis was performed on the data to gather insights. As a preliminary research vector, these methods were selected to gain initial insights with time and budget constraints and to suggest further primary research vectors to follow to validate insights gained and assumptions made.

Demographics

I started my research by trying to get a better understand of Reddit's user base. I leveraged existing data for this. I discovered that, while Reddit's demographics are shifting with increases in older users and female users, the largest demographic base remains males in their mid thirties and younger with at least a high-school diploma level education.

Pew Research on Reddit Demographics

Exploding Topics on Reddit Demographics

The Research

For the data-gathering phase, I gathered a statistically-relevant sampling of the "most helpful" reviews from the iOS App Store. It was interesting to see that the vast majority of these reviews were generally negative, with one or two stars being most frequent. I had intended to focus more heavily on negative reviews, since the emphasis of the project was to discover pain points and frustrations, but even the "most helpful" section was already leaning that way.

After gathering this data, a challenge was going through the quantity of information. I decided to try leveraging Perplexity AI as a starting point with manual verification. I found it was helpful, but it struggled a bit to differentiate between pain points and frustrations.

Reddit on the App Store

Reddit users discussing Reddit on Reddit

Insights

I was intrigued to see how consistent the user sentiment was across both App Store reviews and Reddit comments.

Motivations/goals:

Users were consistently motivated by a desire to find engaging content related specific interests (subreddits) and to engage in community discussion surrounding with those communities. The sense of community and commonality around niche interests was a consistent motivator.

Pain points/frustrations:

Users consistently mention frequent updates to the user interface causing problems. Users specifically mention changes to interaction paradigms with core features like the video player as being frustrating. My theory is that changes in the way users are expected to interact with these features causes a break with users existing mental models of how things should behave.

Inconsistent moderation practice was another frequent frustration. Users mentioned being banned from communities for expressing their viewpoints and of difficulty contacting admins or speaking moderator decisions.

Excessive and intrusive advertising and recommendations were another common thread. These frustrations seemed to combine sometimes and give some users the impression that Reddit wasn’t interested in listening to user feedback.

Next steps:

Leadership could do well to foster a greater culture of user focus, especially being a user-driven and user-supported platform.

Next steps should include building an understanding of user expectations around core functionality and user interface paradigms. More thorough usability testing before updates could help mitigate user frustration. Understanding community expectations for moderation and building consistent policies would also be helpful.

A series of user interviews or focus groups would be helpful to build that empathy and understanding. Hearing directly from users will be important to build that empathy and make meaningful changes.