Kindle Gets Social
Since its launch in 2007, Kindle has become a beloved reading app that over 150 million people use across multiple platforms worldwide.
But people sometimes get lonely reading in their little bubbles and want to talk books.
Curling up with a Kindle
When Jeff Bezos created Amazon to sell books in 1995, he laid the first brick in the library that was to become the Kindle. Bezos wanted to create a device that used an E-ink display and allowed users to immerse themselves in a book without distractions that other devices are prone to create. From concept to launch, it took his team three years for the first-generation Kindle reader to be available in 2007.
How the pandemic hurt book clubs
One of the ways that avid readers have engaged in socialization for hundreds of years has been through book clubs. Members would read the assigned portion of a book over a period of time, after which they would meet to share their thoughts and feelings about the content with others. Social distancing and public safety put a sudden halt to this cherished gathering, however, and the tradition is yet to recover. Readers find a void in their lives where they would turn to comfort in knowing they had a safe space to share their thoughts and feelings about the content they read.
The Kindle app and how people use it
We started our research by exploring the Kindle app across multiple platforms, checking for any anomalies that could affect the user experience. On finding none too noticeable, we chose the iOS Kindle app as a model moving forward.
On conducting a heuristic analysis of the app, we found some aspects that caused a few efficiency issues. Most of these were limited to the user's experience of purchasing a book, and that didn't affect the aspect of the socialization element of reading, so we recorded them but moved on to study the competitors Kindle had in the e-reading and audiobook fields.
Researching ebooks
The other piece of the puzzle for understanding where the Kindle app stood and what its users got from it, was to analyze the competition. We compared the features that Google Play and Apple Books offered with those provided by Kindle. The exercise allowed us to create the table attached, giving us insight into the many requirements now considered standard for e-reading apps, such as downloading samples, viewing more books by the author, and sharing books with others via social media.
Fantastic users and where to find them
We compiled a series of questions that would provide us with ample information when presented to our interviewees.
Some of the questions we came up with were:
How many books have you read in the past month?
How do you normally find books to read?
When do you read?
Do you prefer to read a physical book, e-book, audiobook, or another format?
Can you describe your experience of sharing content online?
What aspects of the sharing experience do you find most impactful?
The next step was to come up with a list of possible candidates to interview and to prescreen them with a survey made using Google Forms. Once we had shortlisted some avid readers through the process, we split up into teams to conduct a few interviews each and reconvened with audio recordings to transcribe and process for information.
Making sense of the data
My teammates and I processed the data we had gathered independently and then as a team. We came across some fascinating and valuable insights regarding people's reading habits and the value of sharing content with people in their lives.
People noticed that their relationships deepened when they shared recipes, books, and restaurant recommendations with people in their circle, regardless of the medium used to share the content.
Another important element was the impact of the pandemic and social distancing. So many meetups that they took for granted, such as book clubs or coffee shops, had become fond memories of the past. Social bonds and human connection, over any medium, held more value in their lives than they ever had.
Reading as an experience, many of our interviewees shared, was not an experience they felt ended on the last page of the book. When they enjoyed a book, they wanted to process it, to share their thoughts and feelings with other readers, in a safe, non-judgmental space.
Developing personas
Hannah was the primary persona we developed as a result of our research and synthesis. She loves reading and often reads many books at a time, either during her commute or when she unwinds before bed. She has tried to find platforms to hold discussions after she has finished reading a book, but has found that often on the internet people will post negative and disrespectful responses.
How might we help our persona?
We defined our core problem to be:
Hannah needs a safe place where she can interact with other avid readers like herself because she wants to share her thoughts and feelings about books she has read.
Then we brainstormed the various ways we could solve her problem until we felt we had our fingers on the pulse.
We knew the first step was to define the user flow we wanted to take in the design of our solution so as to provide the best mechanism to confirm that the solution worked,
Brainstorming solutions
My team and I brainstormed and sketched solutions extensively. The basic idea was to provide a discussion forum within the Kindle app in order to ensure the people involved in the discussion were readers.
There were many good ideas we incorporated in the process of brainstorming resulting in one final design sketch.
What we made and why
The core solution we designed was a discussion forum linked to the Kindle app. Each discussion thread would be tied to a book, which is intended to help guide conversations toward books in general.
The forum, called Book Talk, is accessible from within the book that the user is reading, and from the "More" section in the main Kindle app. When Book Talk is accessed from within a book, it takes the user straight to the threads for that book.
If the user chooses to visit the Book Talk forum from the main app route, then the forum opens up with a display of threads from several books, arranged chronologically, with the thread that has the latest reply at the top.
Book Talk
The page for a particular book within Book Talk shows all the threads related to the book. A reader can search for specific keywords or create a new post if what they want to share doesn't seem to fit in another post. Posts can be sorted chronologically or by the number of replies in the post.
Tapping on the post, or the view more button, opens up the post for the reader to view in more detail.
The post shows the Original Post (the OP) as soon as it is opened. The reader can search for keywords within the post, in case they are trying to find a certain message or text. The OP or the replies to it can be liked to show support or flagged to alert the moderator that it is a post that may require their attention. The replies to the post are displayed chronologically, with the newest reply on top. The reader can also post a reply when they open up the post.
The reader gets the feedback that their reply was posted when they see their reply as the most recent reply to the OP's post.
Time to (usability) test it out!
With Book Talk we designed a book-related space, that is moderated and allows Kindle users to chat about the books they are reading in a comfortable space, without the fear of being harassed. The next step was to formulate a usability test plan and execute it with some testers. The use cases we asked our volunteers to test out is as follows:
What did we find?
Our testers understood the concept and 2 out of 3 were able to find the Book Talk icon with ease. We took some of their feedback, to make the icon bolder, and implemented it in our prototype.
Our testers were able to open posts and reply to the thread they wanted to, so within our small test group, the system worked!
Future improvements
We would want our users to be able to quote specific lines from the book to include in the posts they create on the forum so they have more context to their thoughts.
We know some of our users may want to revisit the chats they were part of so we want to create a user history that points them to every thread they have participated in.
Core challenges affecting the project
Since this was a class project, it was made with severe time constraints, two weeks to be precise. We know we would love to be able to do more research in terms of the number of users we interview, and the UI design we could create for the Book Talk forum. If given more time, I would love to revisit multiple aspects of the project to put more time, and a larger amount of data, to inform the decisions we made. It was an excellent experience and we learned a lot about UX Design principles, as well as work division and project management.