UX Design for Audio Books
My journey of designing and testing an audio book and what it taught me about user experience
Creative Brief
For Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill, I wanted to create an audiobook experience that would not only appeal to history buffs but a contemporary audience. With this being said, I also wanted my work to honor Winston Churchill and the country he fought for and eventually led as Prime Minister. These two objectives heavily influenced my choices when it came to the audiobook’s cover art and the organization of its metadata.
Cover Art Process
As a visual learner, I sought inspiration for the cover art via photos of the Boer War. These photos ranged from paintings, authentic photos from the war, and even reenactment photos.
From these photos, I created a color pallet that I wanted to apply to my cover art.
With the color pallet, I was ready to start creating. My cover went basically through two phases. I knew I wanted to use the Union Jack for my cover art. I felt like a cover of the Union Jack would promote a more modern, minimalistic look. But, I knew I wanted Winston to be honored through my work. So, I went from a plain Union Jack with my selected colors to a Union Jack with transparent background of a photo of a young Winston Churchill.
The cover with Winston’s photo evolved, though. The story of Hero of the Empire… is a grand, sweeping tale of Winston’s escape as a prisoner of war. I wanted to show a progression with the cover arts in order to match the progression of Winston throughout the story. With this thought, I created cover art for each part of the book that changes depending on what chapter you are on in the book. The chapter that corresponds to the part will display its specific cover art.
Metadata Process
Like unto my cover art process, I wanted to create a smooth, sleek, and modern experience for the metadata of the audiobook. However, this was definitely not the case when I first downloaded the audio files for the book. The titles of the files did not show any indication of what chapter they belonged to, only the disk that they were downloaded from.
In order to organize this data, I opened all the audio files in iTunes and listened to each one. I was trying to find each file that started with the narrator saying “Chapter…” From here, I changed the title of the file so I could later organize the chapters from their corresponding audio files in Audiobook Builder.
After organizing the files into their corresponding chapters, I created the audiobook. However, I was not done organizing the data. When the book was imported to iTunes, I edited each file so that the metadata could show cleanly on the devices that I was going to use for testing. One issue I ran into, however, was giving credit to the narrator. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him hidden within the advanced data or if I wanted to display his name on the forefront of the audiobook’s data. In the end, I decided to include the name of the narrator with the author’s; I felt like a less experienced audiobook user would consider this important information.
With the metadata organized, the time came to test and finalize the audiobook.
Testing the Metadata
The audiobook transferred over well to all of the devices (iPhone, iPad, and Android) However, at first, the cover art was pixelated. This was fixed, though, when I uploaded the cover art to each chapter in iTunes, rather than uploading the cover art through Audiobook Builder. I don’t know why this occurred exactly; maybe the DPI (dots per inch) through Audiobook Builder is worse than it is on iTunes. Despite this, the metadata was displayed smoothly on each device; the audiobook thankfully worked well on each device.
Conclusion
This project really solidified the importance of organization and metadata for me. Sure, the design and aesthetics are very important; however, if the content is not organized or presented in a useable manner, the product becomes a chore to use. With good metadata, comes usability. With usability, you can then focus on making an aesthetically pleasing product. Hand in hand, they make a good user experience. All of the things I learned in the project, can be applied to any design, be it web pages, applications, physical products, and more.
Daniel Sanderson is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to the audio book in the DGM 2260 Course and representative of the skills learned.
