Kindle Connect — A New Social Feature for the Kindle App

Molly Goldberg
Jul 22, 2017 · 8 min read

Kindle approached my team of designers to solve a problem for them — develop a social feature for the Kindle app that best suits their users’ needs. Specifically, they were seeking flows for:

  1. users to add friends to their Kindle network
  2. users to join book clubs based around a specific topic

As project manager for this assignment, our team discussed each other’s strengths and weaknesses and moved forward with a plan to successfully research, design, and present what we would call Kindle Connect in a two-week sprint.

RESEARCH:

Competitive Analysis

Amazon’s Kindle is the most popular and successful e-reader in the world, with well over 55 million users, a library of over 4.3 million books, and tiered subscription options that has made it’s revenue stream and user base consistently grow over the course of the last several years.

The Kindle app is not devoid of competition. Apple’s iBook and Barnes & Nobles Nook are strong competitors with large user bases and trustworthy parent companies. However, iBook and Nook have significantly smaller libraries, and no social feature. Goodreads, which was purchased by Amazon in 2013, became our clearest competition in the social reading community space. Users can rate and recommend books, comment and like others reading choices, and even join book clubs (if book clubs with over 1,000 members sounds appealing). Nonetheless, Goodreads interface is busy, and unintuitive, making it’s social features difficult and frustrating to navigate.

User Interviews:

Our team sent out a screener survey to find eligible interviewees — our target users were kindle or kindle app readers, were in or interested in joining a book club, and were regular social media users. We received 45 responses and agreed on 7 appropriate interviewees.

Our goal in the interviews was to understand how and why people want to talk about books. We asked our users specific questions like:

Tell us about your history as a reader?

How do you decide what to read?

Why haven’t you joined a book club?

What would your dream book club look like?

When and why do you read?

What’s your preferred platform to add friends on social media and why?

SYNTHESIS:

Our interviews provided us with thorough and detailed information about our users behaviors and preferences.

Together we affinity mapped to identify those trends and we learned the following -

6 of 7 users:

Don’t think that book clubs will meet their needs

Would rather join book clubs with friends instead of strangers

5 of 7 users:

Pick books to read based on their interests

Prefer Facebook’s function of adding friends, “friends you may know” tool over other social media platforms

What does that mean?

Well — users are already under the impression that book clubs just won’t work for them, but why? While kindle app users love to talk about books, they’re hesitant to join a book club without their friends, and they are particular about what they read. So these users don’t want to join a book club with random people, and they’re definitely not going to join a book club if they aren’t interested in the topic or book.

Key Takeaway:

We learned that our users will only join an online bookclub if one of the two following conditions are met —

Their friends will be in the book club OR the book club will meet their specific topical interests.

Problem Statement

With this in mind, we arrived at 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 and topical preferences.

Personas

We created two personas to represent our primary and secondary users.

Our primary user, Kate, is a social butterfly. She has been reading her whole life, and uses the Kindle app to read on her commute to and from work. She stays in touch with her college friends, who are also readers, by texting and through social media. Recently, she and her friends were laughing about a book they realized they had all just read, and Kate craved another way for her and her friends to keep in touch and read books together.

Our secondary user, James, just moved to Seattle from New York. He has been a heavy reader his whole life, and was a member of book clubs ever since he graduated college. However, James is very particular about what he reads — he won’t just join a book club to meet new people. Now that he is in a new city, he doesn’t know where to look for a reading community that shares his interests.


DESIGN:

With our problem statement and personas ready — we knew we needed to design a reading community that could meet both Kate and James’ individual needs. This reading community would live in the Kindle App and would be called Kindle Connect — a social space where readers could create customizable book clubs based on their friends, their interests, or both.

Our design process was cyclical and consisted of multiple iterations of every aspect of our design. Our sketches, wireframes, user flows, and prototypes changed constantly as we tested our prototypes and learned what worked, what didn’t, and why.

Design Requirements:

Our brief from Kindle specified the need to create a flow to add friends to Kindle connect, so we started our first sketches and user flows from there. We learned from our interviews that our target user prefers and enjoys Facebook’s friend search function, and particularly, their “friends you may know” tool. Our first flow and sketches took our new user through a series of quick and easy steps that would allow them to link their Facebook friends to their Kindle Connect network. We also created a flow for users to add friends once they are in Kindle Connect.

From there we created a flow for Kate to create a book club based on her friends on Kindle Connect, and for James to create a book club based on his interests.

Usability Testing Round 1:

With these sketches and flows ready, we began our first round of guerrilla user-testing by using Marvel, and we received invaluable feedback. Our users found our UI elements clear and intuitive, but they found some of the information cluttered and unnecessary — so we decided to consolidate for our second iteration.

Usability Testing Round 2:

We prepared a testing lab at our workspace where I conducted and facilitated the user interviews while my teammates took notes and were able to view the user’s choices through a separate monitor.

The initial scenario prompted users to add friends to their network. All six of our users found this flow to be intuitive and pleasant. Our design for new users to add their Facebook friends to the Kindle network was successful, and remained untouched during the remaining iterations of our design process.

When I asked users to add new friends once they were in Kindle Connect, they were lost. We placed the “add friend” button within the users profile, a common location for users to add friends on other social media platforms. Our users were still lost. So, we followed the users’ hands and noticed that they wanted to add friends from multiple paths — through their profile, an “add friend” icon in the navigation, and through the sidebar menu navigation.

Our iterations of how users could add friends — initially through their profile, and later through a button and menu option as well.

Another challenge our users faced was decision paralysis on the “create a club” page — where we offered them the ability to name their club, add their friends, upload a photos, make it private or public, and more. We thought handing the users all they could need on two screens was a great idea. It was not. So from there we decided to break the “create a club” process into multiple simple steps, and we would show the user how many more steps they had until they completed the process.

Our earlier iteration shows all the options users had to create a club on two pages. Our later iteration segmented these decisions for users over a few screens.

Our most significant takeaway from breaking up the “create a club” flow into a series of steps allowed us to actually consolidate both Kate and James’ flows into one — we had landed at a simple design that would meet both our primary and secondary users’ needs in one singular process.

The card flow for creating a club would allow Kate and James to customize their book clubs in the same process.

More user tests allowed us to finesse our design to meet our target users needs. Our final mockup can be viewed in Invision here.


Final Thoughts:

Our group was proud of the work we accomplished in a short two week period, knowing still that there is a lot of work and potential to be done on Kindle Connect. The social media landscape is immense, and designing a cross-over of a bookclub and social media feature for Kindle was no small feat.

Moving forward, we would like to further develop our user’s ability to create book clubs with time constraints, and browse existing book clubs. We would also like to develop features within the book club for users to track others’ reading, add new books, set calendar notifications, and share recommendations with others. I plan to continue working on Kindle Connect as a project with a great deal of real life potential.

As project manager, I was satisfied with my leadership of the team as it pertains to professionalism, time management and delegation. I am feeling increasingly more comfortable with the research, synthesis, and presentation process, and find a lot of joy in learning to understand and empathize with the user. I hope that in projects to come that I will have more opportunity to really suss out my design skills so I feel that my proficiencies as a designer are balanced.

Molly Goldberg

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