eBook content is not meant to be consumed, it’s meant to be experienced.
On a daily basis, people consume a lot of content. Although content can be found traditionally and digitally all around us today, a majority of the people discover and receive content through the screens of their devices. However, how much of the information that people consume is actually retainable? What makes certain content more memorable and helps improve the overall experience?
When it comes to presenting content through an eBook or any type of medium, the best way to help people retain the most information is to include media assets and interactive features, not just text. Information that is presented with solely just text makes for a dull, boring experience and will often times lose a reader’s interest. Who wants to read dense text? The answer is: no one.
Content doesn’t have to be presented with just text. What’s interesting about content creation is that there are different ways in which it can be formatted. The most common types of content formats include:
- Text: One of the easiest ways to present information.
- Visuals: This could be anything from pictures, charts, and infographics to help increase comprehension.
- Video: Increases audience engagement.
- Audio: Enables the audience to listen to content.
- Interactive Features: Captivates people’s attention and keeps them engaged.
Implementing various content formats throughout a project, without over-doing it, can potentially increase the interest level of an audience and have a greater impact on their experience. Although using different features within a project is effective, a good rule of thumb, however, is to not overdue it.
The two main design principles that I kept in mind when creating this project, as well as my audiobook project, were: KISS (“Keep it simple, stupid) and consistency since I wanted to create a seamless experience that was relevant to my topic — Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs eBook Creation Process
In order for me to create an effective, meaningful experience for the readers of my Steve Jobs’ eBook, I had to go through the product design process — research, ideation, implementation, testing, and publishing.
1. Research
At this stage, I had to look into what kind of information was available to me. I knew from the start that I wasn’t going to create an entire eBook for the Steve Jobs book (due to time constraints) so I had to consider what information I wanted and what I wanted to leave out for this project.
Problem #1: What chapters of the book did I want to present to someone who wanted a brief overview of Steve Jobs’ life without having to read the entire (577+ page) book?
Problem #2: What assets, besides the text, did I think was necessary to include to augment the reader experience?
Problem #3: How was I going to lay out the media assets that I collected?
Problem #4: What features from iBooks Author did I want to integrate into my eBook?
Solution: It all came down to research. First, I looked over all the chapter titles of the book to see what intrigued me the most. After spending some time learning about some chapters of Steve Jobs’ life, I came to the conclusion that chapters 1, 3, 5, 9, and 42 were the most impactful. Why? These chapters were major milestones in Steve’s life. Although the other chapters in the book are just as important as the chapters that I chose, I felt as if these sections conveyed the most of some lesser known turning points of Steve’s life.
- Chapter 1: This chapter provides an overview of Steve’s childhood (from the time he was born in 1955) and how he always identified himself as being abandoned, chosen, and special.
- Chapter 3: The happenings in Steve’s life starting in 1972 are explained in this chapter— college, his interests in extreme vegetarian diets, LSD, and Eastern spirituality.
- Chapter 5: This chapter jumps into the origin of Apple and how it came to be. This is one of the most significant parts of the book because this is where readers learn that the Jobs house in Los Altos was the assembly point for the first ever Apple product — the Apple I.
- Chapter 9: In 1980, Apple’s IPO (initial public offering) of its stock is launched and becomes the “most oversubscribed initial public offering since that of Ford Motors in 1956.”
- Chapter 42: This chapter explores the impact that Apple has had on various industries over three decades.
2. Ideation
Here, I began to sketch out the work flow of what I wanted the experience to resemble in my final product.
Building off of my previous project — the audiobook — I decided to keep the style guide consistent and ended up using the same cover, fonts, and colors.
3. Implementation
The first thing that I collected was the text from the chapters that I wanted from the eBook. In order to acquire this content, I went to the location of where the book was purchased — the Kindle App. Shown below is what the text looked like from the application.
Since I didn’t have access to this eBook on my personal computer, I copied and pasted the text from the original file to a Google Document. Although the text is well-formatted in the Kindle app, when copied over to a separate file, the format got distorted… Oh no! This was probably the most tedious task that I had to do since I had to organize everything by referring to my physical copy of the book to figure out where one paragraph started and where it ended. Shown below are the steps (starting from left to right) that I went through to get the layout that I was aiming for.
The reason why I chose to justify all the text, rather than aligning everything to the left was because I wanted the eBook to somehow still resemble the physical book. Rather than having just a straight left edge and an uneven right edge, I wanted the text to be cleaner and to have a more formal look and feel to it, as shown below.
- Cover Art
Unlike the chapter cover art that I had created for my audiobook project (as shown above), I did something a little different by adding a few extra elements to the eBook version (shown below).
Instead of having just a “mini-Steve” subtly walk across the screen as the reader progressed in the book like in the audiobook layout, I decided to also include a timeline. Since there are only five chapters in this eBook, I was able to implement this timeline; this would have been impossible in the audiobook cover art (because of all the chapters and limited space on the page).
The chapters are broken up by the different years that certain things were occurring in Steve’s life — 1955, 1972, 1976, 1980, and 2011. The masked image of the number will be related to whatever is going on in that specific chapter. Take Chapter 1, for example; since this is a chapter that explains Steve’s childhood, I used an image of Steve as a baby. Later on in this chapter, I also included a gallery of a few pictures.
Other features, besides the gallery, that I implemented include the following:
- Glossary Terms: Text that can be found in the glossary are denoted in bold. Once clicked, a pop-up with a short, scrollable description of the glossary term appears. For most of the characters in the book, I included a picture and a quote. When looking for assets, a lot of the pictures that I found were in black and white. Therefore, I put a light, black overlay over the images to match the rest of the eBook more.
- Pop-ups: Like the glossary term feature, pop-ups also have a small description box that appears over the page, when clicked. The only difference is that instead of clicking a bolded text, the reader has to click on an icon. By clicking on the Apple logo icon, readers can learn random facts about Apple.
- Video: In Chapter 4 where it talks about Apple going public and becoming successful, I included a short video clip of Steve Jobs giving advice on the key to success. I did this because placing a video in a highly text-dense project is a great way to present quick, rich, and engaging content to help give the reader additional information.
- Hype Widgets: Rather than having features that were mainly static, I decided to include a few Hype animation features to upgrade the overall experience. In the first example, shown below, I created a short animation of the evolution of Apple’s logos.
In the second example below, the graph appears when clicked within the eBook (the animation is not looped like a gif in the actual eBook but for demonstration purposes here, I used a gif).
4. Testing
One of the most tedious, yet important steps when creating any product is testing. Testing is critical as it allows you to uncover any UX problems that need to be resolved. Sometimes, depending on what type of device someone is on, the layout of the content may change. For this particular project, I tested my eBook on my MacBook Pro and my iPad Mini.
- MacBook Pro: For the most part, I didn’t have any trouble assembling the content the way that I wanted it. I had to tweak a few default settings to avoid problems like inconsistent line spacing between paragraphs and a few other problems that I will be discussing below.
Problem #1: The text of the title automatically switched to lower-case (even though it was all capitalized in the editing application) when I viewed the eBook in Preview mode.
Solution: I went back to my original chapter cover art files and created .PNG files of the text so that I could just insert the title as a picture.
Problem #2: Whenever I placed an image onto a page, it didn't align properly. I wanted the image to be centered, but for whatever reason, iBooks Author’s setting didn't enable me to change that.
Solution: I found out that the gallery widget automatically centered objects so instead of having a single image that was off-centered, I found extra pictures and inserted a gallery instead.
- iPad Mini: You would think that my eBook would appear the same way on my iPad as it did on my MacBoo, nope!
Problem #1: Sometimes, the placement of media like photo galleries and videos affected the way the text appeared on my iPad Mini. In some chapters, the implementation of assets left a huge gap in between paragraphs.
Solution: I had to rearrange content to try my best to eliminate the awkward white space as much as possible. In this example, I moved the photo gallery a few paragraphs down. Although the gap isn’t entirely gone in this particular section, as you can see below, it got less prominent.
5. Publishing
After testing and resolving problems a few more times to make sure everything was functioning and appearing properly, I was done!
Conclusion
Although I’m pretty satisfied with my end result, there is definitely a lot of room for improvement and I still don’t feel as if I am completely done. The product design cycle is a perpetual cycle that needs to be taken seriously. Each phase of the cycle requires different skills and efforts, and needs to be repeated to enhance the experience of the product. If it weren’t for all the steps that I went through, this project would have been extremely difficult. Taking the time to set a well-formatted foundation and direction for this project was extremely valuable to me as it helped me develop a workflow that aimed towards my goal of creating a seamless, engaging experience of an eBook in a non-traditional way.
To view my entire Steve Jobs’ eBook, make sure you have the iBooks app on your device and then download the file here for free. :)
Ellie Hoyt is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web Design with an emphasis in Interaction & Design. This article explains the Product Design Process that was implemented for the Steve Jobs eBook built in the DGM 2260 Immersive Authoring course.
