The problem
Tumblr’s blog view is the profile page for every user on the platform. The header had accumulated six icons over the years (search, message, gift, follow), each of equal visual importance. There were so many actions up here that it was truncating usernames that weren’t very long.
Additionally, blog subscription notifications are Tumblr’s highest-performing push notification in terms of open rate and reactivations. It was buried behind a menu in the blog view. Likely many didn’t know it existed.
Fig 02 The blog header as of October 2024. 4 icons, a “snowman” overflow menu, and no clear indication you can be notified when this blog posts.
One action
I ranked the header actions by importance and set up a progressive model: Follow the blog first. Once you’ve followed, the button becomes Subscribe. Once you’ve subscribed, it becomes Share.
Everything else (search, messaging, gifting, blocking, reporting) moved to a bottom sheet behind an overflow menu.
Results
We ran a 50/50 A/B test on Android first over two weeks, 720K users per bucket.
Fig 03 Control (left) vs. test (right).
Fig 04 The overflow menu.
- Blog subscriptions
- +38%
- Subscriptions per user
- +39%
- Push notification opt-ins
- +101%
- Users following blogs
- +1.7%
- Asks per DAU
- +16%
- In-blog searches
- -15%
The decrease in in-blog searches was the trade-off we’d planned for. The increase in submitted asks was a surprise; we’d made the Asks entry point more discoverable on more blogs. Rather than re-crowding the header, I proposed moving search into the blog’s tab bar (Posts / Likes / Following), a place with more room that could eventually surface post count and filters. That work is in progress.
Some users tried the Subscribe action and then unsubscribed, but new subscriptions outpaced them by an order of magnitude.
Following this success, iOS shipped the same design.