Jun 26, 2016
Kindle IOS App — Adding Social Feature
This was one of the exciting projects to work on. As a UX designer, the project was to find out whether to add a social feature to Kindle IOS applications or not.
High Fidelity Prototype in Invision:
Design Process
This is our design process diagram. I start by researching the original product and its competitors to find out what users like and dislike about the application in terms of their social presence. Second, I did user research — which consists of user surveys to find the percentage of users comfortable with sharing their reads and reviews, interviews with the same users to understand the reasons behind their emotions, and generating personas based on user research. The third is to set user tasks and flows, map out wire-framing based on the user journey and task flow, prototyping — which contains low, mid, and high fidelity wireframes and testing the prototype of each of them by constantly going forward and backward synthesis and making changes. The circular moment of this process means free follow into each step and making constant changes using these steps depending on the needs.
Research
I started our design process by researching the original Kindle Product and found out there is a hidden feature to recommend a book to a friend. The interaction was to hard tap on the book image from the kindle app which shows the option to recommend the book. To find out if Kindle users know about this feature I tested it out with them, turned out they had no clue about it.
So when you hard tap on the book image and click on “Recommend this book”, users have to use their iMessage or email friend by getting out of the Kindle application.
There is also a social application called good Read, where users can create groups and discuss their readings, but the link to this app can be found in the settings section.
Competitive Feature Analysis
Then I started with a feature analysis of Kindle competitors to find out different social features they have and how they are helpful for users. So the competitors were Ibooks, Bookmate, and Scribd. I also thought of using Meetup for doing feature analysis as its most used application for connecting with people having similar interests.
Above is the table showing the feature analysis of the Kindle and its competitors. As you can see Bookmate has the most social features as compared to others followed by it is Ibooks and then Kindle. So to find out if people actually prefer Bookmate over Kindle because of its social features or if people like to be social when it comes to reading a book, we conducted a survey.
User Research (Survey)
In this survey, I found out that, the majority of people liked to read e-books. 50% of people used Kindle, followed by iBooks and last was Bookmate with only 3.1% of readers. I also asked users if they like joining any kind of book club, — 54% of people said no and 45% said yes.
To know why people did not like the concept of socializing when it comes to joining a book club, I conducted interviews with people who took part in our survey.
User Research (Interviews)
The participants in the survey who liked to be contacted for an interview shared their contact information. We got in touch with them via phone to get a better understanding of their behavior and their personality.
When asked about their experience while reading books, most people treated books as their best friends and find an emotional connection with them. Hence they found it uncomfortable talking to strangers about the books they read. Few like to recommend books to close friends or like to take recommendations from friends as they have similar interests.
When asked if they would like to use a social platform to talk and share about what they are reading most of them were against it but few said they would like to if any of their friends were part of it.
Synthesis:
After collecting a lot of data the next step was synthesizing the data. Above is the image where I have some key data points from our survey on the left and an affinity map of our interview results on the right. I used this data to find patterns and identify how our users approach conversations about reading. I then questioned how to fulfill the needs of the users and still satisfy the original mission of Kindle: a distraction-free e-reader. But I needed to remove myself from the equation, get past our assumptions about users, and align my understanding of our user's needs, so I created personas. I came up with two personalities, John and Jenny.
Persona
John is an online reader and he likes to discuss and share what he read with his friends. He likes taking recommendations from his friends to read books. His pain point is he wants to know if others have read the same material, so he can engage in discussions. So based on John’s personality and behavior our scenario for John was-
John has a co-worker with similar reading interests and he wants to find out what he is currently reading.
Jenny is a homemaker. She is interested in joining different book clubs and likes to socialize. Her pain point is She is concerned about technology getting involved with reading books or socializing. So based on Jenny’s personality and behavior our scenario for Jenny was –
Jenny is reading her first e-book and wants to use it to connect with friends to discuss about it.
Original App Map:
I studied the original app map of kindle to figure out how can we implement a social feature into Kindle without distracting users while reading a book.
New App Map:
This is a new app map. I integrated a social feature called “Kindle Circle” into the Kindle IOS app. Kindle circle is like an online book club, giving book recommendations to other users. But keeping in mind the privacy of users while reading I created an entirely new path for Kindle Circle, as I did not want to get in the way of readers and distract them. Those who do not want to be part of Kindle Circle can anytime go into settings and make their account private.
User testing Low Fidelity Prototype:
Based on the changes I started creating low-fidelity wireframes and did a quick paper prototyping user test. These are the images of our low-fidelity paper wireframes and a user test on the paper prototypes. Creating these allowed us to a quick transition from iteration to testing the validity of our proposed features.
Based on the data I collected while testing the low-fidelity prototype I started making changes and creating mid-fidelity wireframes and prototypes to conduct a user test.
User testing Mid Fidelity Prototype:
Mid Fidelity Prototype using Invision:
Here are some key screens from our Mid-Fidelity wireframe's and second round of user testing below. The increase in detail allowed for more focused test results, giving me a greater insight into our user's perspectives and any potential problems.
While user testing I got a pretty good data, users said:
· The notification message was hard to see.
· I would have preferred if there was some kind of sign on the homepage showing a notification.
· The book reading status looks like book downloading status.
· It would have been helpful if “Create A Circle” had been part of “My Circle”.
High Fidelity Wireframes:
The user tests gave me the data I needed to create high-fidelity wireframes. Here is the link to our high-fidelity prototype :
High Fidelity Prototype using Invision:
Next step:
As the design process says — free to follow any steps as needed and make constant changes.
1. Test the high-fidelity wireframes and collect data and make changes to the wireframes.
2. Check with developers and designers to integrate “Kindle Circle” into the original Kindle App
