The Buffer app has by no means actually had a house web page. You enroll, you undergo onboarding, and also you land in Publish — a queue, most likely an empty one, with a calendar and plenty of buttons.
For an skilled person, that is nice! The calendar is the product for lots of people. However for somebody who signed up 4 minutes in the past, it is a unusual place to start out. We have been dropping new customers into the “present person” expertise and hoping they’d determine the remaining.
We simply launched Buffer House to vary that. That is the primary main change to Buffer’s person expertise since our visible redesign in March. I need to share a bit about it, in addition to the technique beneath it — why we constructed a house web page in 2026, and the place Buffer’s UX is heading from right here.
The activation drawback
For a few years, the most important development alternative inside our product was retention: getting individuals to come back again. We invested closely there (streaks, objectives, lifecycle emails, a usually extra polished product), and that work paid off to a level, however we nonetheless had a big activation problem.
Activation is about serving to extra of the individuals who enroll attain an “a-ha!” second from utilizing Buffer as a social media toolkit, and whereas we’ve labored laborious to supply extra options and a greater workflow to facilitate that “a-ha”, customers want to seek out all these options first.
Our important device for this, for over two years, was a welcome guidelines. It labored, statistically, to extend activation a bit. However it was additionally extra ceaselessly dismissed than acted on, lined a small slice of what Buffer can do, and handled everybody identically — a solo creator, an company, and a developer exploring our API all obtained the identical 4 first steps.
So the primary job of Buffer House is to interchange that guidelines with a web page that folk can have interaction with and meet them the place they’re at. New customers now land on House after onboarding and see a small set of setup playing cards that replicate what they advised us about themselves. (We’re working this as an A/B take a look at with new signups, as a result of we would fairly know than assume it helps.)
What it does for everybody else
If you happen to’ve used Buffer for years, you do not need assistance connecting a channel. For present customers, House is a spot to see the state of issues earlier than you go do the factor: your upcoming posts, feedback you have not answered, and a abstract of your posting habits. All the pieces is clickable, so it really works as a launching level fairly than a dashboard you admire after which go away.
The present-user model is deliberately minimal in model 1. There is a lengthy checklist of issues House may floor — deeper insights, workforce exercise, urged content material — and we left most of it out on function. We might fairly ship one thing we consider may nonetheless be useful and study from actual utilization than guess on the good web page.
The place it may go from right here
We’ve an formidable imaginative and prescient and roadmap for Buffer over the subsequent 12 months: we’re overhauling our analytics and insights options, persevering with to develop Group, and making Buffer extra highly effective for groups dealing with social. (And that’s not all!)
House performs a key function in guaranteeing every of these developments, and finally, your most essential social advertising and marketing duties, are simple to seek out and use.
Let’s say you’re a contributor in a advertising and marketing company, and you’re accountable for drafting posts for evaluation by an editor — there isn’t a straightforward approach to merely act on evaluation suggestions. It takes 3 to 4 clicks to see the suggestions immediately. I consider House can and will floor these essential evaluation feedback so you may act on them in a single click on.
A web page that unlocks, fairly than provides
The half I discover most attention-grabbing strategically: Buffer House introduces nearly no new functionality (but!). All the pieces on it (posts, feedback, templates, objectives) existed earlier than. What modified is the way you encounter these issues.
Buffer has grown plenty of floor space through the years, and when each function lives behind its personal tab, it is solely found by individuals who go searching. A house web page flips that: it might probably progressively reveal the product based mostly on the place you’re in your journey, as a substitute of presenting fifteen doorways and wishing you luck.
If you happen to’re new to Buffer, you might already be seeing House. If you happen to’ve been round some time, it is coming quickly! I would love to listen to what you’d need from it. Take a look at our public roadmap for this function or attain out to me on LinkedIn.
