About Quad

thequad.com

Quad is a Y-Combinator startup that helps students answer the question, “What do I need to get done?”. By bringing together all their assignments and classmates in one place with crowdsourced data, students are able to get more done, help each other, and ultimately succeed.

Problem

With analytics tools, we realized there was an imbalanced number of total users and weekly active users.

Users

College students that need help making their college experience less stressful

Goal

Identify and relive the pain points in the app causing the large difference in total users and weekly active users.

Discovery

Mixpanel analytics quickly surfaced a concerning insight: the assignment creation and edit flow, a core functionality, was largely unused.

If information is not being updated or accurate, students are unable to rely upon the app for due date notifications. Since that is the most utilized feature, those students will have no trouble dropping the app from their daily lives.

This problem resulted in a large number of users leaving the app after several weeks of usage.

Research

To understand why the assignment flow wasn’t being used, I conducted user testing sessions focused on app exploration and scenario-based tasks. Two key issues emerged:

1. The unexpected switch to a dark theme which intended to signal a serious action, felt jarring to users
2. The form appeared simple at first, it dynamically expanded with additional steps, making the flow feel unexpectedly long and tedious.

Solution

The flow was updated to a light theme to align with the rest of the app and maintain an open, friendly feel that reduced perceived friction for users.

To reduce the perception of a long, shifting process, the form was consolidated into three persistent input fields. The Due Date field triggered an overlay, indicated by an arrow, which cut the number of taps in half and streamlined the flow.

Style & Illustrations

To support the shift from a sleek, serious tone to a more friendly and inviting experience, the app was updated to foster a stronger sense of community to encourage users to see their actions as benefiting both themselves and their classmates. This included the addition of warm onboarding screens and student- and school-themed illustrations.

Quad also adopted a mascot to make it even more inviting. A sloth named Evan 🦥

Outcomes

We performed user testing with new and existing users. Both were able to successfully edit and create an assignment using the new flow.

The amount of new users that dropped off from the app after several weeks was reduced by 60% compared to users who signed up before the change went live.

The number of edits to assignments jumped up by 25% within a month after launch.