Booting user retention at Pi with
AI-driven push notifications.

I worked with Inflection, a leading AI company, to launch & grow 'Pi' – an innovative artificial intelligence personal assistant. A significant design challenge that I led involved addressing the retention issue; despite boasting a substantial daily active user base of around 800,000, we noticed that less than 4% of users were retained after the initial 7 days.

We had capacity for a relatively small project focusing on 7 day retention, and after discussion we decided that experimenting with push notifications could provide the most impact for the least effort.

Working closely with the Product Lead, I ran user interviews, survey, and data analysis. We could then inform our design decisions with the following insights:

  • Users wanted messages from Pi to feel like they were coming from a friend.

  • Users commonly requested check-in messages from Pi.

  • Messages asking about a users day had high engagement rates.

  • Connection & companionship represented one of the key strategic opportunities for Pi.

The process

These insights directed me towards an engagement strategy focused on creating a deeper emotional connection with Pi. I conceptualised and designed a simple solution called Daily Moment that would make Pi a part of users' daily routines, akin to a conversation with a friend. 

The hypothesis was that this would drive higher re-engagement and retention
as it would act as a reminder and give users a reason to come back to the app.

Solution

The feature sends personalised, AI-generated push notifications to check in on users daily. Working closely with the engineering team, we figured out how to leverage AI to generate push notification content. This was a groundbreaking approach for Pi and it paved the way for future features. 

To measure the project's success, I lead on creating a detailed experiment plan to track key metrics, including opt-in/out, reply rate and retention rates. I also added a feedback form into the flow to maximise learnings. The feature initially launched to a portion of users and we included an A/B test trying different content on the card.

Impact

The introduction of Daily Moment exceeded our expectations. The reply rate within 6 hours was 40%, indicating a high level of user engagement with the messages from Pi. We also observed a significant increase in user retention among those who opted into Daily Moment, demonstrating its effectiveness in keeping users engaged with Pi.

However, the opt-in rate for Daily Moment was only 4%, which gave us a target for the next iteration.

“I tried it out of curiosity, but as time goes on I find that I’m anticipating the message.”

— Pi user

Learnings

The Daily Moment feature's success in enhancing user retention at Pi highlights the importance of simplicity and personalisation in designing effective user engagement strategies. 

My role in this project allowed me to leverage my skills in user research, collaboration, and innovative solution design to make a tangible impact.