Chrome Following Feed

Google’s new tab page surface before the follow feature.

 
 

The web is a Sea of Information…

…but that’s not always a good thing. One of our flagship products at Google is Search. Billions of users come to Google every day to search for answers, products and information. But users had no way to keep up with their favorite sources, websites and creators.

With the Follow product, our goal at Google is to help strengthen the relationship between users and their favorite sources.

How it started…

When I joined the team, Follow was a fledgling concept it its early stages. The team had built out a mechanism that enabled users to Follow their favorite websites. However as it turned out, users didn’t quite think about the web in the same way that they would their favorite Instagram creators. Overall, there were a few problems with the overall experience that was keeping it from really bringing value to our users in Chrome.

  1. Users didn’t know about the feature, if they did it was hard to find or easy to forget when they were browsing.

  2. Even if users did know about the Follow feature, it was really hard for them to think of websites they’d like to follow off the top of their head.

Google’s start surface with Follow MVP. The empty state left a lot of room for opportunity in terms of prompting users with suggestions.

Our Mission

Help users find the Following Feed and easily follow sites they care about to deepen their relationship with the web. In order to do this, we focused on strengthening 3 main areas of the experience.

  • Feature Awareness

  • Onboarding Education

  • Follow Suggestions

Feature Awareness

Users come to Chrome on Android devices by default. Chrome is the standard browser for Android users. Therefore for features like Follow, we really have to meet users where they are in order to introduce new features to them. One way to help address feature awareness for Follow was to catch users’ attention on the new tab page, where they most often will open a new tab to search a new topic or start a new journey. We did this by prompting them with an IPH and a notification badge on the Following tab to let users know that there’s something new there for them to see.

User Onboarding

Once users were aware of the feature, we needed to teach them how to use it and show them it’s value to get them to keep coming back. In order to do that, I designed two onboarding educational cards that helped catch the users attention and show them how to use the feature. The first one is shown above, it sits a the top of the following tab and introduces the feature to users. It will only appear the first time a new user visits the following tab. After that we’re prioritizing source recommendations to the user.

Our second educational card was at the bottom of our recommendation feed. It told users how they could follow any websites they wanted by opening up the overflow menu while visiting a site.

Suggested Follows

Last but definitely not least, we needed to build a way to recommend sites that a user might like to Follow. Since we learned from UXR that users could only think of 3-5 sites to follow tops and most of them were top news sites. This effort took just about a year to complete but our engineering team build a recommendation engine that leverages a users search and browsing activity, to match users to a list of recommended niche publishers in terms of recommendations. This enabled users to Follow websites right from the new tab page.

Results

This Summer, we’ve fully launched this feature on all android devices in the US. Please go try it out and let me know what you think!