TruePublic Engagement Redesign

Partner: TaxAct · Mobile/Web App · ~6 min read

TruePublic is an anonymous opinion sharing platform where people come to ask questions they would not normally ask on social media and also to answer similar questions. Once you answer a question, you can immediately see statistical breakdowns of how others responded. No name, no email, no profile picture. The product gives brands and researchers a rare view into how different groups actually think at the moments they're making decisions.

The team needed to reduce churn rate, improve engagement, and introduce Reasons (a new way for users to explain their answers) without compromising the anonymous, low-toxicity model the product depended on.

But TruePublic was losing users at every stage, and the research showed the problems went well beyond churn rate.

We didn't have a clear segmentation of who was leaving or why. The experience was also inconsistent across surfaces (design, navigation, and front-end implementation), so even when a problem was identified, the fix didn't always propagate cleanly across the product.

60% of churned users complained about poor onboarding and complex navigation. The original onboarding was a series of marketing-style screens explaining what TruePublic was before letting users do anything. The homepage was a static category list, not a personalized feed.

40% of new users said they didn't find engaging questions on the categories page. Without ML-driven personalization, users landed on content irrelevant to their interests and bounced.

55% of users wanted a way to express their feelings about the options they chose, not just vote. The platform had no mechanism for that, and adding one was risky. A comment field on a polarized-topic platform leads to long threads, harassment, and moderation overhead a small team cannot manage.

This was a live product with ~19K followers on the "Would you rather" Space alone by early 2020. Getting any change wrong would impact existing user behavior, not just new users.

I combined qualitative and quantitative research to understand both behavior and intent:

20 user interviews across new, active, power, and churned users

5 moderated usability tests on onboarding and homepage navigation

I segmented users into six cohorts: new, active, churned, and three churn windows (one day, one week, one month). Treating churn as one number hides the underlying retention problem. Someone who leaves after one day has a different reason than someone who leaves after a month, and the interventions are different.

That segmentation, combined with the pain-point data, mapped to three areas of work:

One-day churn + 60% onboarding complaints → simplify onboarding

One-week churn + 40% disengagement on categories → personalize the homepage

55% of users wanting to express feelings → build Reasons

Research and design ran in parallel. I validated each hypothesis through usability testing or in-app surveys before development. For Reasons, I tested the core interaction before launch to check the constraints didn't feel limiting. They didn't. All three improvements aligned with the existing sitemap so they could ship incrementally without breaking active flows.

Onboarding: simplified and skippable 60% of churned users complained about onboarding. The original flow was a series of marketing-style screens that explained what TruePublic was before letting users do anything.The redesign focused on three things:The new flow also reinforced anonymity in concrete terms (no name, no email, no phone, no geolocation, no picture) instead of a generic privacy reassurance.Comparison of mobile app screens labeled 'BEFORE' and 'AFTER'

Homepage and Navigation: a personalized experience 40% of new users said they didn't find engaging questions on the original homepage. The page itself was a static category list. Users had to know what they wanted before they could browse.The redesign rebuilt content discovery around three things:Post-launch usability testing and analytics both showed users navigated more easily and engagement increased.Screenshots of a dating app with various features

55% of users wanted to explain their votes, but adding a comment system risked accelerating the toxicity Reasons was meant to prevent.

Reasons added a new layer to every question's stats page. Users could reveal the reasoning behind their vote without turning the platform into a comment feed. The design relied on constraints to keep the feature healthy:

One reason per question, no threads or replies

Users must vote before writing a reason

Default view shows a limited set of reasons, not a full feed

No editing, only delete and repost

Voting and reporting on every reason, with human moderation

Each constraint was a tradeoff. Threaded replies were the obvious feature ask from users, but rejected because polarized topics turn threads into arguments and demand moderation a small team cannot sustain. The 280-character single-reason model was a deliberate ceiling.

Reasons also unlocked B2B value. By turning every question's quantitative answer set into qualitative motivation data, brands could finally see why people chose what they chose, not just which option won.

+47% engagement — measured as weekly active sessions per user

+65% new users — month-over-month signup growth

−43% churn — 30-day churn dropped from 15.9% to 9.1%

+64% CSAT — post-onboarding survey scores

Previously churned users cited Reasons specifically as the reason they came back in re-engagement interviews. The product secured a $1M SAFE round during this cycle.

Each improvement mapped to a specific user behavior we'd measured, not a hypothesis. The cohort segmentation made it possible to attribute outcomes to specific design decisions onboarding simplification drove the first-day retention gain, homepage personalization drove the one-week retention gain, Reasons drove the reactivation.