Amazon Kindle: A Social Experience

UX/UI Case Study

Project Overview

Role: UX/UI Designer
Duration: 2 Weeks
Client: General Assembly UX/UI Program
Tools: Figma, Google Workspace
Team: Tom Hatton - UX/UI Designer, Kavier Lo - UX/UI Designer
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The Brief
(Theoretical Course Project)

“How can Kindle become the preferred method of not only reading, but sharing progress and reflections while connecting with others?”
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Designing features for Kindle to allow users to connect and support each other’s reading goals through social engagement and increase customer retention through reading metric based gamification.

Observing the Landscape

I conduct C&C Research on competitors like Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, and GoodReads as well as comparators such as Spotify and Strava to understand the behaviors and trends of the social reader market.
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Key Takeaways:

Currently the online bookstores offer little or no social interactions.
Kindle users love e-ink and are willing to accept its limitations to enjoy its benefits.
Users desire social engagement so they use apps like GoodReads or TikTok to supplement their book reading apps.

Kindle users have developed a culture around their love of this technology. This informed our decision to interview not just book readers, but also those who read using the Kindle e-reader specifically.

Understanding the Users
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User interviews were conducted with 5 Kindle and 4 Non-Kindle readers. Our objective is to understand the backgrounds, feelings, motivations, and behaviors of readers regarding discovery and social connection over reading.

Key takeaways were:

Find books at the recommendation of friends.
Desire book clubs with users of similar taste.
Had yet joined a book club, but would if the right conditions were met.

My team and I synthesize this research data through affinity mapping to form the following user persona.

I create a journey map to add real world context to our personas experience.

Investigating Solutions

Using our persona’s problem statement, I ideate multiple How Might We’s for additional perspectives.

How might we make feeling alone and disconnected feel like an adventure?
By designing tools the user can use to explore new connections.
How might we support Paige in finding new friends with similar interests?
‍Provide a match percentage based on books read, wishlisted, or interacted with.
How might we allow users to connect with others over shared interests?Public book clubs based on books, authors, genres etc. where like-minded readers can interact.

It was important that we maintain the reserved tone of the Kindle environment. We created a user flow and sitemap to be certain that our features would fit holistically into the Kindle’s flow.

The sitemap informs the navigation of our wireframes. We factor in other constraints such as:

The technology constraints of e-ink.
Accessibility in regard to color contrast and font size.
We base all spacing of the interface on golden ratio proportions of the physical Kindle screen dimensions to maintain an organic flow.

A profile page is created for users to stay in touch with and encourage others, check their own metrics and achievements, and to organize and view their friends.

I design a page to suggest readers who have also finished the same books upon completion.

Using the wireframes, I design a prototype to perform a Moderated Usability Test with both Kindle and non-Kindle users. I task users to find new friends, and sharing book recommendations with them using the prototype.

Click Here
‍To View Prototype

Synthesizing Our Research

Our findings:

Users had difficulty recognizing notification icon.
Inviting strangers to join book clubs made users uncomfortable.
The difference between sharing books and book clubs was confusing.

These findings shape the functionality of our next iteration.

Book Clubs are designated as public spaces.
Book Clubs now have a dedication section on bottom navigation tab.
Move the notifications from the system settings to the bottom of the page in a more easily seen location.

My initial C&C research indicated that Amazon would likely be bringing color e-ink Kindles to market in the coming years. We introduce the visual relationship of colored e-ink into our hi-fi mockups to reflect how these features might look in the foreseeable future.

Conclusion

The Kindle currently strikes a balance of utility and simplicity to maintain a distraction free space for readers. Our research indicated a need for social interactions within the reader community as long as the implementation took their tastes into consideration. Providing users with social features while attempting to keep the user experience free of distractions proved to not be a contradiction, but rather a welcomed constraint that we used to inform many of our design decisions.