The Client Brief
Amazon wants to increase customer engagement by introducing a social aspect to the Kindle reading experience. The app lacks the social aspect, and people love to discuss what they’re reading! Amazon wants to introduce more social aspects to the Kindle experience by allowing readers to comment on and discuss the books they’re reading.
Tools for Project
- Evernote for Collaboration
- Pen and Paper for prototype design
- Sketch and Invision for high fidelity prototype
Research Strategy + Deliverables
The research framework began with an open team brainstorming (Design thinking) session, to visually map out ideas, combining them together in a diagram form: all ideas related to the social aspect to reading: the essentials, hows and whys of sharing ideas and perspectives about books.
Interviews and Survey
We conducted 6 interviews (3 interviews each)
Our main objective in approaching the interviews and survey questions were to understand the deeper implications of reading habits , motivations, and behaviours around reading and sharing books.
We used Google forms for our online survey and received 38 respondents.
Insights from Interviews
Insights from Surveys
The most significant findings were the responses relating to joining a book club and sharing a reading experience.
Empathy Map + Personas
To uncover a variety of personality traits for our pre-determined kindle personas, our team worked on an "Empathy map" of a typical reader or a Kindle User.
This mapping process having empathy for the person's thoughts, what they generally see and do. What she gains from her lifestyle and activities, What she hears, feels and subsequently identifying her pain points.
Kindle Social | Personas
Competitive Analysis
To determine a design strategy for the social Kindle sections of the app, we did a SWAT analysis of competitors in the market of reading apps. We were able to construct our app features by considering what was features were missing from the competitors.
1. Private groups
2. Creating groups
3. Messages within groups
4. Friends reading lists
5. Annotations in private groups
App Feature Prioritising (MVP)
Project Scope | Identifying the MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
My team design workshopped the features possible in the early stages of the app concept, before sketching out our prototype and testing with users. To do this we drafted up a matrix map to identify the most divergent scope possible. Then narrowed our scope by finding our minimum viable product for developing further.
Iteration | Pen to Paper
User Flows
Social | Finding Friends | Creating Groups
Building the prototype
Key Insights | Usability Testing
Demo | Invision prototype