A fan letter to Juggernaut
A user’s story using a beautifully designed platform and some lessons for designers buried in between the lines!
The skeptical user
I love to read. Put a good book in my hands and I’ll forget about your existence till the book is done. But I’m also highly opinionated and risk averse about new authors — I won’t buy a new book without reading several reviews. I also love the feel of a bound book in hand. And so I’m not interested in reading devices and apps. I have tried reading ebooks on my phone. But after accumulating dozens of unread PDFs, I gave up. It’s just too hard and uninteresting to read on a phone.
So with these reservations in my mind, here is the story of my love affair with Juggernaut.
A chance discovery
It was this itch to publish a book and the search for a publisher which lead me to Juggernaut, a platform for self publishers. The value proposition sounded great — democratize publishing. So I invited myself to the party.
The weekly letters
Like most online services, Juggernaut began sending me emails.
‘Every Monday, from Juggernaut’ — an interesting, bold choice for a newsletter.
Unlike most other online services though, they weren’t weekly newsletters or marketing emails with a bunch of industry related links — they were letters. The team behind the soon-to-be-launched application wrote about what was happening behind the scenes. The language and tone of the email was conversational and refreshingly human. It was an absolute joy to read—and I was looking forward to them.
They introduced those who were on board — if there ever was a kickass dream team, this may be a strong contender.
They described their cloud tech — Slack, Trello, Marvel AND Sketch. How cool was that?
They brought on board designers — the actual kind, mind you. And when they used words like usability and wireframes in true context, my heart skipped a beat.
Then they moved to Shahpur Jat and proudly showed off their office space — I’ll admit I felt jealous.
Juggernaut did their homework well. And to make sure they were on the right track, even sent me a questionnaire to understand me better. I remember one question vaguely — would I read a long form article on the phone?
Hold on! Read? I thought the app was about publishing.
I was somewhat confused, maybe slightly betrayed. But based on my understanding of my past behaviour, I said I’d not read long-form. When Juggernaut shared the results of their survey, it turned out I was a minority in the user survey. Maybe I wasn’t the target user after all. And just like that, Juggernaut didn’t look so interesting any more. I’d pretty much tossed it out of my head and didn’t even know when the App was launched.
The road to rediscovery
A month after their launch, I received an email. Juggernaut just gifted me a book. My reaction: “Not another ebook! And what kind of a book is that? But hey, a free book is a free book!”
So I downloaded the App and signed up.
Love at first UI
What struck me at the outset was the beautiful attention to detail to the user’s experience — unheard of in India; but even in the global context, Juggernaut does a stellar job.
Let’s start with the all-important signup process. These days everyone wants you create an account or use some existing social account to use their services. Juggernaut is no different — but makes the process more elegant. For email users, the app does away with the common login and registration buttons. A single field and the app does the decision making.
And look what happened next:
Rules to create a password differ from one service provider to another. Unfortunately, communicating these rules is often an afterthought on a user interface — a wordy description below the input field, or worse, an error message after you’ve painstakingly entered the magic symbols.
Juggernaut’s use of the placeholder text is a beautiful solution to ease the user’s password creation woes. I can’t speak for everyone. But I’ve not yet forgotten my password, thanks to this initial reminder.
Juggernaut’s use of the back button twice for exiting the app is also interesting. We Android users have got used to using the back button to go to the previous screen or functionality of the app. This works well for most applications. But on apps with a tabbed interface, the 'previous' functionality can be accessed by a swipe, as well as the back button.
What happens in most applications, then, is that the user ends up opening the app several times after accidentally closing it. Even my favourite WordPress app makes me do that. Juggernaut adds a little message at the bottom asking the user to use the back button twice to exit. While I have seen this in other apps, it fits in Juggernaut’s context—on the other apps, it is plain annoying.
The playful graphics throughout the app are hard to miss, and reveal the extent of the thought behind the entire application. But the cream on my experience cake has to be when the App stops responding (yes, I realize how silly that sounds).
Shortly after I began using the app, I started demonstrating the App’s flow and friendly microcopy around my team as an example of great design.
Breaking behavioural assumptions
I began this story with a description of myself as a user. Turns out, Juggernaut knew me better than I did. Juggernaut has systematically questioned and broken my assumptions about my own behaviour.
You had me at Free
I browsed through the available titles in the app — the kind of books I wanted to read were all in the public domain. That meant I could begin adding books to my virtual bookshelf for free. I downloaded books to my shelf and was actually reading them. The ‘pages’ were easy to read and the text flowed seamlessly. Before I knew it, I had finished reading ‘The Time Machine’ in 3 days.
From time to time, Juggernaut gave me free books — new releases from unknown authors; books I would never have even given a second thought about reading — and I went on a book reading binge.
I became a version of a stereotypical bookworm. I read while traveling. I let my brew go stale between sips till I reached the end of a chapter. I ignored all humans and food around me. And I fell asleep cradling a ‘book’ in my hand.
Except my books didn’t make my bag heavy; they were environment friendly; and I was reading while I was working in office without anyone realizing it (maybe I shouldn’t mention that). During one week, I averaged 1.5 books a day.
From good design to delightful experience
In a previous story, I had written about the importance of communication in the customer’s experience. Juggernaut seems to have predicted every possible thought in my mind. I never had to wonder about what to do at any point of time. What’s more, they’ve released several updates with subtle enhancements — almost as if reading my mind.
Initially, I faced several issues using the app without a proper internet connection. Fortunately, the support email is mentioned very prominently on the App. So I sent an email. Saurav promptly responded and thanked me for the feedback. While they couldn’t fix the problem immediately, he promised that the issues would be resolved during future releases. And the subsequent updates did resolve all my issues.
What’s more, it appeared as if the designers were picking up my behaviour (sounds creepy, yes — but in a good way) and after one app update, added the option to download the book immediately after purchasing, to make my experience even better.
I am sure the application is still undergoing several changes and it is likely that the problems with offline reading I am currently facing will be resolved soon (hi folks, nudge nudge wink wink).
Taking it one step further
It’s not just the front end design, but the entire team behind the screens that helped make sure I felt comfortable. So when I had trouble reading one para of a book, I didn’t hesitate to approach Juggernaut’s support team. And guess what, Saurav sent me a screenshot of the para that I could not see on the app, while they were working to fix it at the back.
Closing the loop
Thus far, Juggernaut has invested heavily in the reading experience. Sure, I wasn’t interested in it before. But now I am, and I see why it is important for a self-publishing app to do so. By changing my own behaviour, and opening me up to reading little and unknown authors, Juggernaut is ensuring I have a reader base on the App which will hopefully be willing to read my book when I am ready to publish.
So can Juggernaut put any foot wrong? I don’t think so. And I hope not.
Now time for me to get cracking on my book :)
