Project 2 Retrospective — Kindle Connect

Amazon’s Kindle is the the number one eReader app in the world. With the largest digital library (4.3 million books) and cross functionality with the Amazon market place, Kindle’s user base continues to grow, soaring far above any of it’s competitors. This puts Kindle in a great position to experiment with new features and continue to build upon it’s already incredible user experience.
My team and I were tasked with doing just this. In just a little over two weeks, we put into motion a process to design a new social feature for the Kindle mobile app that allows users to share and discuss books within their social network. A digital book club, if you will.
The brief we were provided with outlined two tasks to focus on as we set out to develop this new feature:
- Design a flow that allows users to form a book club based around a topic
- Design a flow for users to add friends to their “social network”
The goal of the project was to retain the magic of the Kindle app, and to unobtrusively provide a new feature that readers could utilize at their discretion.
Research
Without pre-existing insights, we set out to learn more about readers , book clubs members, and look into how people add friends to their current social networks.
Competitive Analysis
We wanted to learn more from the eReader market; what insights can the current eReader landscape provide us that will help us tailor our design? As mentioned earlier, Kindle is the number one reading app in the world, however it’s not alone. iBook by Apple and Nook by Barnes & Noble compete with Kindle, rather unsuccessfully at that, as both apps have significantly smaller libraries and user bases. We learned that both apps provide nearly the exact same functionality as Kindle, but more importantly, that they too had no social capabilities.
We turned our attention to the one app that does attempt to provide a social atmosphere for readers to converge. Goodreads is a successful book review app that allowed for users to share and discuss certain books within groups. It’s user base continued to grow to 16 million when Amazon purchased the company in 2013 as a way to control the review marketplace. Since then there has been nearly zero integration into the Kindle app, which feels like Amazon is just hanging Goodreads out to dry. Lastly, it’s busy and unintuitive UI puts Kindle in a good place to develop and implement its own social functionality.
User Interviews
We sent out a screener survey to multiple online outlets in order to filter potential interviewees for our target user: someone who uses the Kindle App, is in (or wants to be in) a book club, has social media familiarity, amongst a few other factors.
We ended up selecting seven interviewees. The goal was to understand the social aspect of reading and the nature of how people discuss books. We delved into the “whys” of their behavior and helped them do this by asking questions that probed imagination, figuring out what the our interviewees truly valued in the realm of reading, book clubs, and social preferences. Furthermore, in regards to solving our task of designing a flow for users to add friends to their social network, we asked about their social media use and their understanding of this process. We picked apart the details which led to a lot of great data that we could use in our synthesis process.
Synthesizing the data
Making sense of what we learned is the bridge that allows for real insights to be formed. If research is the foundation of your house, then synthesis is the uprights that hold the roof up.
We were able to quickly identify certain trends in our research results. We found that 85% of our target users are under the impression that book clubs wont necessarily meet their needs. These needs ranged from not fulfilling certain time requirements, to not selecting books within their interests. That same percentage also stated that they’d be interested in joining book clubs with their friends as opposed to with strangers. Nearly uniformly, our interviewees mentioned their enjoyment of Facebooks methods of adding friends to your network. This was in regards to their mutual and suggested friends functionality, as well as being able to connect to their Facebook network from various 3rd party apps.
“There is nothing more fun than finding out that your friend has just finished the same book as you and talking about your favorite parts. I just wish that we talked about the book while we were both reading it!”
We spent a few days curating all the data and separating users behaviors and needs into formats that real semantic connections could be drawn from. The affinity map makes a good tool to do just this.

It was in this step that we realized that our research had led us to results weren’t entirely in-line with our given task. We found that while there are some who want to create book clubs for a certain topic, that most users want their book clubs to be friend based, where his or her small network of friends can be in an exclusive book club from where ever they are in the world.
From here our design started to evolve into its final form, which would consist of creating a flow for our users to create a book club for one of two purposes:
- to discuss books with their personal social network
- to discuss books based around a topic, not necessarily with people they know.
With that in mind we developed our problem statement:
Kindle app users need a customizable online reading community, because they want a way to talk about books that specifically meets their social & topical preferences.
Personas
We developed two personas that would accurately represent to possible users of our new feature. Kate is our primary user and her needs are centered around discussing books with her friends, hence dubbing her the “social butterfly.”
Kate’s primary objective is being able to connect with her friends who lived in other parts of the world over one of the things that they all have in common, talking about the amazing books they’ve all been reading lately. For Kate, an online hub that allows her to be in a constant discussion and chat with her friends, while being able to utilize their quick access to their reading materials and read in a shared way is what our primary user is looking to do.
On the other hand we have James, our secondary user whose primary needs aren’t centered around the social aspect of book clubs, but instead participating in a discussion around specific topics within his interests, and being able to share with people who have the same interests.
Design
Our design process consisted of multiple iterations of every aspect of our workflow, meaning our user flows, sketches, wireframes, and prototypes were revisited for change multiple times eventually landing on what is now called Kindle Connect.

Our design began by prioritizing our users needs and creating a user flow diagram to be able to visualize the steps needed to achieve the goal.
We learned from our interviews that users really enjoy and prefer the Facebook method of adding friends to their network, so we began by giving our new users a modal flow for them to immediately sync to their new Kindle Connect friend base. Beyond that we needed to develop a way for users to create a book club and to add friends within the app.
By drawing up some paper sketches we were able to perform some guerrilla user-testing within Marvel and begin collecting valuable feedback.

User Testing
We set up a test lab where my partner and I were able to take notes and view the testers flow on a separate monitor, while our other partner conducted and facilitated the tests.
The initial “link to Facebook” flow seemed to be intuitive and rather straight forward. We more or less left that untouched throughout our iterations besides moving it to within the Kindle Connect feature from the Kindle home page.
One challenge our testers faced was successfully being able to add friends to their network. We originally decided to stick to convention, that your friends could be accessed from your profile, and from there you could add more to it. However our tests showed that users were quicker to go to the homepage and try the side menu before clicking the profile icon. Only after they realized the profile wasn’t accessible form the side menu would users look for the profile icon. We figured that in a wireframe prototype the profile icon would be more visible and then they could find it again. We were mistaken.

Users were still confused. We came to the decision that we’d place what we wanted users to find right where they were looking for it. Our later iterations contained icons for the user profile and a add friend icon to the bottom footer.
Another challenge was taking our users feedback and redesigning with it being considered. We were learning that users were being overwhelmed with the amount of information that seemed to be needed on our original “create a club” page. Our primary user’s goal was to create a club centered around their friends, so we added a function that allowed you to do just that. However it took up a large amount of real-estate and started to confused our testers. To compensate we decided a smart move was to take up on very complicated page and turn it into a series of guided steps that provide a clear and linear path to the end goal — creating a club.

By breaking it up this way we were able to easily accommodate both our primary and secondary user’s goals in the same flow.

More user tests showed our new design to be smooth, operate-able, and pleasant for the user. We turned it into a high-fidelity prototype which can be viewed in Invision.
Final Thoughts
While we set a strong foundation for a new social feature, social networks are vast and contain a lot of time and resources to properly develop, test, and design. For these reasons we have only sussed out a very minimal task of setting up a book club. Moving forward I plan to start building out new branches that allow the user to add books and create clubs from specific book selections. In this same regard, Kindle Connect right now stands as a completely separated sub-feature within the Kindle app. I think it’s important to add more crossover between the two. Lastly, the social discussion feature will require more in0-depth design, as this is where most of the book club users will be spending their time.
All in all it was a positive experience. During the project I was able to refine some of my design skills as well as practice more thorough user interviews and tests. The purpose of these tests, as well as the purpose of designing prototypes of different fidelities became very clear during this project. In the last project I fell short on the presentation of my research and findings, and knowing that going into this project I was able to spend more time on the synthesis and development of our ideas in order to make sure that the work done during the research phase carried over into our design sufficiently.
That being said, I do see a real potential with the Kindle Connect feature. The Kindle App currently provides an excellent reading experience, and I think the market’s absence of any social reading feature really gives Kindle a strong footing to venture upward into this vast online landscape.
