How do I prevent recommendations from being perceived as ads?

Question

I have an app for learning Chinese that keeps track of the vocabulary the user knows.

Based on this vocabulary, it recommends videos to watch that will be comprehensible to the user. In each entry it will show a corresponding estimate like "90.963% comprehensible".

At the end of a reading lesson where the users has learned new vocabulary, it will also show recommendations after the end-of-lesson summary:

I have gotten less engagement on these recommendations than I expected, and it seems that one reason for this is that some users perceive these recommendations as advertisements. Rather than realizing the usefulness of the feature, they automatically ignore them because of the ad-like appearance.

(I learned of this fact after one user left a review complimenting, among other things, the unobtrusiveness of the ads. The app does not contain any ads.)

Is there a better way to present these recommendations to the user in a way that they will realize that they contribute to their learning, rather than perceiving them as advertisements?

Answer 1

It's great that you are listening to user feedback and actively trying to make improvements!

I think with anything relating to design, the context is quite important and where possible you should use a combination of design elements/strategies to ensure that your message and design outcome is achieved.

I think the first thing you can experiment with is the actual heading for the videos. Using the phrase "recommended media" it might seem like a typical media website that tries to push content in the user's face (that are promoted through paying for 'advertising space'). So perhaps changing it to something like "Watch and learn" or "Listen for the words here" could improve the perception as it is actively telling the user that the content is related to their learning.

The second thing you can experiment with (but you probably don't have much control over this) is how the links to the videos are styled. Perhaps if you applied similar visual aesthetics to Vimeo instead of YouTube it will seem less like an advertisement.

And of course, the best way is to try and capture some qualitative feedback from the users or analyse the data (that you can capture) to see where the improvements can be made.

It looks like a pretty neat application and I hope that you can make the changes and get more users :)

Answer 2

As was mentioned elsewhere, the title of the section feels like an advertisement. Titling it something like "Media Practice" or something that implies it is a further learning tool may engage students further.