Redesigning Chartbeat’s Home Screen to Improve User Engagement

Spearheading a comprehensive redesign to boost user satisfaction and retention by surfacing key metrics and streamlining navigation.

Background

Chartbeat is an analytics tool that helps publishers understand how their audiences engage with content across websites and apps. The Home Screen is the first page users see when logging into Chartbeat. For new users, it plays a crucial role in onboarding. For existing users, it's a page they may visit multiple times a day. However, despite its importance, the Home Screen hadn’t been updated in years. It failed to communicate the value of Chartbeat to new users, leading to drop-offs. Existing users found it lacking in features and often bypassed it entirely.

As Chartbeat set a company-wide goal to increase product usage, I led an initiative to analyze and improve engagement across key product surfaces. One glaring insight: 25% of new users didn’t return after their first visit, with many citing the Home Screen as a barrier to further engagement.

Discovery & Goals

During the discovery phase, our aim was to understand both user needs and business goals. I kicked off the project by facilitating a team workshop to align on objectives and scope. From that, we set clear goals:

• Increase click-through rate within the first 15 minutes from 75% to 95%.

• Boost user satisfaction with the page.

• Drive more users to retention-driving features like the Historical Dashboard and Email Reports.

Hypotheses & Data

With time constraints, we started prototyping early, relying on existing data and key assumptions. We hypothesized that low engagement stemmed from:

1. Users not seeing relevant data.

2. Users missing key links and features due to hidden or collapsed content.

Analyzing the data, we found that users were twice as likely to click in-page links over the main navigation. This indicated that expanding our existing in-page linking strategy could effectively drive more users to a wider range of features. This insight guided our approach—by surfacing more relevant links and data, we could better direct users to high-value features that enhance retention.

User Research & Prototyping

To validate our hypotheses, we gathered feedback on prototypes, focusing on showing more relevant data for a single site rather than a list of multiple sites. Below are sketches from various stages of the project:

Version 1
This was a rough sketch of the concept for showing data for a single site as opposed to a list of sites. It was visually rough at this stage, focusing more on which data to show as opposed to how to show it.

Version 2
In this iteration I continued to experiment with which data to show, but began focusing more on layout in order to see how much information would be digestible.

Version 3
This iteration began focusing more on visual design, increasing the information density while also attempting to reuse patterns used elsewhere, to make the data more recognizable.

Version 4
This was the sketch we used to get feedback from users. In addition to including historical data, we also included some features we knew were we’d unlikely be able to include in scope but which we wanted to get feedback to help us shape our future roadmap.

We refined our designs through multiple iterations, improving data visibility and layout while experimenting with how much information users could comfortably digest.

Key Insights from User Interviews

In addition to prototype testing, we conducted two surveys (for new and existing users) and held six remote interviews. Our main takeaways were:

1. Single-domain accounts found the page unhelpful
   Users with one domain felt the Home Screen added little value. Many went straight to the Real-time Dashboard.

   "It’s not useful for single-site accounts. I skip it and go directly to the dashboard."

2. The page didn’t aggregate necessary data
   Users expected the Home Screen to summarize both real-time and historical data. Instead, it only showed one metric—concurrent users—which was also visible on the Real-time Dashboard.

   "I immediately drill into specific dashboards. The Home Screen doesn’t offer much beyond that first click."

3. Hidden features caused confusion
   Users didn’t realize that they could expand site data cards, and those who did find it weren’t impressed by the additional information.

4. The new design was highly preferred
   Every user we interviewed preferred our prototype over the current version, which was a strong validation of our direction.

Final Design & Impact

Our final design introduced several key changes while maintaining the core functionality users relied on. By surfacing more data and making navigation clearer, we significantly improved engagement. Key updates included:

• Aggregated data for real-time and historical metrics: Instead of just showing concurrent users, we added key real-time metrics and historical data for yesterday, along with top pages for both real-time and historical performance.

• More visible links to key features: We expanded the links from just Real-time and Historical Dashboards to include core tools like Reports, which are directly tied to user retention. We also removed hover interactions, making all links immediately visible.

Before rolling out to all users, we conducted a small beta test. Survey results from that group confirmed a strong preference for the new design, validating our approach.