If you'd like to see the results right away instead of reading the journey to them, for your convenience, please click on the link.
In another article, I described the details of the global task and what "time spent" is. To better understand the essence, please read a brief introduction or the excerpt below from there.
In the VKontakte news feed, the metric Time Spent (user engagement time) is highly important. The more time a person spends in the feed, the more revenue the company generates from advertising. Our global objective was to increase this time. Through research and a series of AB tests, we concluded that there are several problems to address and challenges we encounter.
In the course of working on this task, it's also essential to consider that the platform already hosts a wide variety of content formats, namely:
Photos, Music, Polls, Files, Products, Services, Geopoints, Clips, Videos, Articles, Albums, Stickers, Podcasts, Stories, Mini-Apps (Services), Playlists, etc.
In our post, there is a large amount of information, and if you notice what you need, you can thank me)
The thing is, inside the posts, metadata with geolocation, source, and clarification of ownership (for selected friends) appeared over time. Each type of metadata was located in different places, which was very inconvenient for users and also greatly increased the height of the publication.
From our research, we understood that the post metadata is indeed scattered, making it difficult to find information in long posts.
We didn't want to add an additional field because logically all the information should be located in one place. Our initial idea was to place a unified entry point in the post settings, or in other words, in the "three dots". However, in this case, the author would have had to make two clicks to access the desired information, and that would result in very long flows.
Let's imagine that you are the author of a large community and you want to check the reach of your posts. You would have to go into each post and click twice. Terrible, isn't it? )
We went further, and I started considering the option of reducing the number of screens. However, in the end, it seemed illogical to me to move the information about the post to a separate screen when there is already a post header.
The task was indeed complex because the post header contains parameters such as:
<aside> 👉 Verification, Translation, Advertisement, Government organization, Friends' favorites, Emojis, photo update status, added photos status, tagged in a photo, Collaboration, Prometheus (Trends for authors), VK Donut, Bookmark addition status
</aside>
There is a lot of information, so at this point, I began developing an algorithm to display the most relevant information for the author. Below, you can see a metadata hierarchy scheme for developers that describes the structure of displaying all the necessary information.