Case study: a new feature for Storytel

A design project to improve learning through audiobooks.

The purpose of this project is to design a new feature for Storytel, an app dedicated to audiobooks streaming.

Storytel has more than 300,000 titles in its catalog and more than 1,000,000 subscribers.

Team

Cristina Alvarez, Nacho Peñalver, Andrea Mancera (me).

My role: Product designer.

Duration: 4 days (January 24–27, 2022)

Tools

UX tools: surveys, interviews, lean UX, competitive analysis, user persona, user journey, user scenario, user flow, brainstorming, crazy-8, low-fidelity & mid-fidelity prototype.

UI tools: moodboard, brand attributes, stile tile, high-fidelity prototype.

Research: Insights

The world of reading is increasingly growing. However, despite the benefits of audiobooks (such as being able to listen to them simultaneously while doing another task and saving time), they are not as popular. According to our study, 7 out of 10 people who read regularly never listen to audiobooks. Through surveys and interviews we set out to detect what makes people reluctant to this format.

The User Persona helps us empathize with the real user.

We found out that the main problem is that people are easily distracted when listening to audiobooks. Also, the main reason people turn to reading is to learn new things.

Objective

We focus on reinforcing the level of attention and improving the learning process of users as they progress through an audiobook.

Results

We designed a quiz system called “Quiz Mode”. It consists of a series of simple questions between chapters about what was recently heard.

Left: Storytel’s recommendations, now featuring “books with quiz mode”; Center: Book streaming with Quiz Mode activated; Right: Quiz prototype.

The user can choose to take the quiz at the end of a chapter, take it at another time, or directly disable Quiz Mode. The results are kept in their profile so they can review them whenever they want. In this way, the user is encouraged to focus while learning and having fun.

We also thought about Quiz Mode as a business opportunity for small publishing houses, for which this new feature could be a chance to promote their books, for example, when users share their quiz results on social media.

Conclusions

This was our first project to add new feature to an existing application and we learned a lot about the possibilities of improving the apps we use every day. Personally, I especially enjoyed the research and ideation process: discovering what the user needs and being able to offer an interesting solution was very rewarding.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to leave any comments or feedback!