Designing a Safe Space for Women's Evening Ritual

Background

FlingFM is a romance audio and reading app built for women — a personal retreat to unwind with stories from tender romance to steamy fiction, in both text and audio formats.

When I joined, the app had around 100K downloads. For the first 8 months I was the sole product designer, owning end-to-end UX across two parallel apps — FlingFM (in-app currency) and FreeFM (ads) — each testing a different monetisation model. Later, a second designer joined and I onboarded them, sharing context, product knowledge, and established workflows.

My mission: make people stay, come back, and grow the user base.

Process

I started by gathering stakeholder interviews, user feedback, store reviews, and product metrics. We used Amplitude for behavioural analytics and internal dashboards for business KPIs — revenue, subscriptions, content performance by cohort.

✶What the data told us

• ~30% of users dropped off during or right after onboarding — they'd browse briefly and leave without engaging
• Sessions were shorter than target — users who stayed weren't spending enough time to form a habit
• Content abandonment was high — users started stories but didn't come back, pointing to poor content-to-user matching

✶What users told us

Desk research, competitor analysis, and validation conversations filled in the why. This wasn't just a "reading app." For most users, FlingFM was a wind-down ritual — 20–30 minutes before sleep. That realisation changed everything:

• Pre-sleep is the key moment — the experience had to support that emotional arc
• Friction kills comfort instantly — interruptions feel disproportionately frustrating at night
• Privacy is non-negotiable — discreet notifications and neutral UI increase trust
• Unexpected intensity damages trust — mismatched spiciness means users don't come back
• It's ritual, not completion — users seek controlled emotional closeness, not finishing books

✶A/B testing as a continuous lens

We tested throughout — tabbed home screen vs. unified feed, book cover variations — and compared behavioural data across both apps (retention, session duration, ARPU, churn) to see how monetisation context shaped engagement.

✶What didn't work

Not every hypothesis survived contact with real users:

• "Chats" with book characters — sounded appealing, but in sessions users found it distracting from their reading ritual
• Mood-based auto-curation ("Play Something Soft") — users rejected it. They wanted low-effort browsing, but they still wanted to choose
• Trope filters / "Not for me" — no measurable retention impact. Liked in concept, unused in practice

These failures taught us: in this domain, agency and control are the product itself.

Solutions

Each feature was a direct response to a confirmed insight.

✶ Reimagined onboarding — 3-step flow: pick themes, choose "spice level," done. Changeable later. First-session engagement improved and early drop-off decreased.

✶ Offline Mode — downloadable content for reading and listening. No more buffering shattering the bedtime atmosphere.

✶ Text-to-Speech dual mode — synced text highlighting with narration, for users too tired to read but wanting to follow along.

✶ Trigger warnings — content-level warnings in book descriptions. Users stay in control, no trust-breaking surprises.

✶ Narrator switching with preview — audio previews before committing to a voice. Like choosing who reads you a bedtime story.

✶ Parent Mode — app lock and neutral push notifications. Mothers could hand their phone to kids without worry.

✶ The tension: UX integrity vs. ad revenue — our foundational principle (no interruptions) directly conflicted with FreeFM's ad model. We iterated: ads only between chapters, skippable formats, buffer screens so transitions felt intentional. A constant negotiation between UX and business — one that never fully resolved, but forced us to be creative about where monetisation could live without breaking trust.

Results

• ✶User retention grew by 14%, daily engagement by 25%, session duration by 15%
• ✶Monthly downloads rose 22%; redesigned App Store visuals noticeably lifted organic installs
• ✶The app went from ~100K to 1M+ downloads — 10x growth in under a year

Reflection

The best growth strategy turned out to be trust. Trigger warnings and Parent Mode weren't "nice-to-haves" — they were the reason people felt safe enough to stay.

Failed hypotheses sharpened the thinking. Chats and mood-based entry didn't land, but they proved something more useful than a win would have: users wanted control, not automation.

And when and why people use a product matters as much as what they do inside it. Designing for someone winding down at 11pm is a fundamentally different problem from designing for a lunchtime browser.