Improving the annotation experience for Kindle’s app readers

Building a seamless note taking system for kindle readers who read books to learn.

💡The Idea

Summer of 2024
Raise your hand if you’re guilty of abandoning your reading lists.

Aspiring to complete mine this summer, I whipped out my long forgotten Kindle app. Upon reading an interesting excerpt, I attempted to save it as a note.

To my utter disappointment the entire process was messy and unintuitive with limited things one could do!

Let me walk you through Kindle’s current reading experience to explain details.

(Dear reader: Please do view on a bigger screen such as a desktop for a better experience.)

📖Understanding the problem

I conducted an app analysis on the existing actions. The two journeys I picked to study gaps in were:

A. Poor discoverability of highlights and notes in a book

Screens showing how a note is made

• The control panel had low contrast while the dictionary was inaccessible.
• The note saved had little to no discoverability on reading again with limited interactions.

B. Lack of categorization of annotations of the book

Screens showing book annotations

• There was no specific categorization available apart from the colour of annotations
• Sections such as “annotations”, “popular highlights” and “flashcards” that were related to each other were in separate action panels.
• The icons in the control panel misled most readers about what to expect when clicked.

Curious if I was the only one, I spoke to fellow readers and those familiar with the app. Discovering similar frustrations, I was inspired to bring my ideas to life.

First let’s meet the people I spoke to,

🖐️Target audience

Regular Kindle readers and subscribers

Centering around those who enjoy pieces of non-fiction, self help or psychology, I narrowed my focus to two types of reading groups:

a. Working professionals that read to build knowledge about their jobs
b. High school/college majors that read as a part of curriculums.

Personas of interviews conducted

Here’s what I gathered from my research,

💭User research insights

• One particularly common complaint was that highlighting text that starts at the end of one page and continues to the next page is difficult.
• Sorting different notes and highlights is tedious as everything is shown together, which leads to a continuous scroll.
• Readers tend to conveniently forget notes or highlights made in books and have to retrieve them individually to view.
• Readers often like to share and discuss interesting texts but the current discoverability of flashcards and social features is low.

I found opportunity to build upon the simple act of writing a note.

🎯Goal

My project strives to improve the overall note-taking experience:

Here’s how I plan to do it-

• Introduce a categorization system
• Provide a recall mechanism
• Integrate AI assist

✏️The process of thinking

First I put my ideas in order to see how they would fit like a complete puzzle

I brainstormed below for a revised note taking journey:

Mapping out a new journey

Let’s break down and define how I would achieve the above-

💡 The existing system I aim to improve:
a. highlighting a section (+writing a note)

💡 The new systems I aim to introduce:
a. A tagging system for categorization
b. A smart recall feature
c. An AI Kindle chat feature
d. An annotation library
e. A passive social feature

I put the above thoughts on paper to build cohesion.

Sketches to of my idea

On receiving clarity on the type of details to present, my journey of designing began: Let’s discover my ideas together!

Introducing the new note-taking system for readers

Here’s how kindle can now change your reading experience:

But first..

📱Why would kindle as a business adopt this concept?

Kindle’s goal is to stay relevant in the e-book domain by keeping users engaged and increasing retention. Improving the annotation experience would help in retention of kindle users as they would keep coming back to refer to their notes.

It would prevent users from switching their eBook readers because kindle now saves their notes for them.

✨ Discovering the app’s new features

Readers can progressively discover new features like easter eggs as they proceed with their reading and note taking experience.

FTUX walkthrough of new features

✨The highlighting experience — designing for context

While the original flow kept a constant set of options, I took inspiration from the context of highlights taken by users:

1. A word is highlighted: I only show the dictionary and the translate
2. A highlight goes to the next page: I provide a seamless transition to the next page with a new icon.
3. A paragraph is highlighted and tagged: I give a gist of the highlighted text to remind the reader.

Highlighting in three different contexts

✨The note taking experience — designing for discoverability

To build a significant improvement, I wanted to answer two questions:

1. Can I access my notes quickly later when I need to?
2. How do I make sure I don’t forget what I’ve written?

My first attempt to solve the above did not, unfortunately, provide the most convincing result.

❌Rejected flow iteration

Based on user testing conducted:

First attempt of designing the note taking experience

⚠️ My approach to the note design ironically proved to be restrictive.

💡The pivot

• I considered a side sheet approach that provided user clarity on actions to be taken.

• I reduced the number of elements within a note by repositioning the AI chat feature.

The new and improved version:

✅Final note-taking flow

The new notes component — spacious & contextual

The interface maintains the simple step of typing a note with a preview of the highlight.

Writing a note in the side sheet

Introducing tagging — solving for categorization

New readers build their tags for notes as they like. This is beneficial as it sorts all notes stored within the book so that they can be accessed quickly later.

Adding tags to a note

Introducing Smart recap — solving for knowledge retention

Revision and recall has always been a tedious process, what if there were a more effortless way to do it?

Recap of previous notes based on tags used

The recall feature pulls out notes written with the same tags that the reader has used for them to remember previous notes.

The note taking journey that includes, writing, adding tags and smart recap

✨Building a book’s recall value

Kindle’s recap feature as introduced above, compiles all notes that have similar tags under a common theme.

The smart recap can be turned into flashcards for our Polscience student to glance through.

Smart recap of the full book

✨Ask Kindle

Since the olden days books are known to have the answer to all your questions and are the companions to childhood.
What if I could ask questions and converse with my own books?

Introduced in the control panel, readers can ask the AI chat feature for any questions about the book they are reading.

All annotations of the book are stored within the highlight icon.

The control panel

The AI chat feature and all annotations stored within a book

✨Annotation Library — a database built just for you

This solves the initial frustration mentioned of having to sort through each book for their annotations.

Here readers can land on all annotations of the book itself and browse through all tags and recaps stored. A library of your notes

All tags, notes, chats, recaps in one place

✨Discussions — a book club

The reason to create a passive social feature is to prevent noise on the app itself. It acts as a platform to share thoughts about interesting readings with a community.

Discussion forums allow you to share

The solution develops an experience that begins with highlighting a section and leads to creating and sharing an entire data base of content consumed

💡Project learnings

• Every tiny detail matters: This project showed how small details in note-taking affect overall viewing and organization of multiple notes.
• Decisions must remain in the hands of the user: Kindle’s AI features should be seamlessly revealed, letting users explore them at their own pace without disrupting their main reading experience
• Simple is appreciated: The key is to not overwhelm users with actions but let them complete tasks with minimal effort such as writing a note.

🔍Metrics to track success

• Daily Active Users (DAU): User engagement of the feature can be tracked through the number of users engaging with the feature daily
• Retention rate: Based on the observation of the percentage of users returning to the app
• Performance productivity and knowledge retention can be tagged through tag utilization and note retrieval efficiency.
• User acquisition: Measures the rate of new users signed up based on new annotation feature.

🎀Wrapping up….

I couldn’t complete my reading list as usual, but I certainly enjoyed still being surrounded by books while I worked. This was definitely an opportunity for me to learn and what better way than with books themselves?

Thank you for reading ✨

It means a lot to me as a writer, if you have any questions or suggestions, Do get in touch with me:
✉️gauri.chakravarti@gmail.com
💼You can know more about me at Gauri Chakravarti’s Portfolio
🔗LinkedIn | Behance | Substack | Twitter

The end.