Building a Reading Habit through Listen, Part 2
This post is Part 2 of a two part series. Check out Part 1 first.
Designing the experience around principles
We used our key insights around listening modes and habits to develop design principles that would help inform our designs. However, building a listen experience from the ground up, on a tight deadline, also meant keeping a close eye on scope and cutting back where needed. Here’s a discussion of how the design principles for this project influenced our process.
Principle 1. Provide audio that is crafted with care because what you hear is the most crucial part of your listening experience.
While our key audience of active listeners were more tolerant of mistakes and a lower-quality voice, this didn’t mean they were satisfied with the status quo. We worked with Mozilla’s Scout Team to integrate Amazon Polly voice technology which offered a significantly improved audio experience. The ability for our team to tweak speed, pitch, timbre, and cadence allows us to find a voice that better approximates a human narrator.
We spent time thinking about transitions between articles and more dynamic voices to help decrease the monotony that is associated with computerized voices. We chose to have different voices for the titles and body text of articles to break up the rhythm and signal that a new story is starting when a user is listening to a number of items in a row.
Principle 2. Make it intuitive and familiar, so you spend less time focused on the UI and more time listening to your stories, plus whatever other task is at hand.
We went through many iterations of ways we could integrate an audio experience within Pocket. Ultimately, we landed on something familiar. You’ll notice that it is very similar to your other music, podcast, and audio apps. We explored more “creative” directions for the audio experience but found that a familiar experience helped users jumpstart their listen experience in Pocket. As research showed, listening happens on the go and when you’re busy with something else, and the last thing we wanted was to introduce an unfamiliar UI which you had to learn on top of this. We used existing patterns instead of reinventing the wheel for an audio player interface.
Principle 3. Be conscious of the content in your list because you are selective about which stories you’d rather read, versus listen, to.
As mentioned in Part 1, not all content is made or valued equally. We designed multiple options for a queuing/playlist experience that would allow users to curate the right stories from their list for their listening experience. Once queued, a user does not have to fuss with their phone to skip articles they did not want to listen to for a more seamless listening experience. But due to time and engineering constraints, we were unable to get to it in our first release. It is something we hope to add in a future iteration.
Principle 4. Provide a smart default experience and the right tools that meet your listening needs.
We sweated over the details to craft a default listen experience that would provide you the right tools when you need them, wherever you are, for whoever you are. This includes:
- Inactive pause player control state with skip actions
- Active player control state with fast forward and rewind actions
- Swipe-based item carousel for easy skipping
- Archive icon in the player controls for easy content management while you listen
- Auto archive option for touch-free content management (available on Android)
- Lock screen controls
