Amazon Kindle Application - Socializing the Reading Experience

Challenge: Amazon wants to increase customer engagement by introducing a social aspect to the Kindle application reading experience, allowing readers to comment on and discuss the books they’re reading.

Solution: Create the content, context and platform for readers to have conversations about books within the existing Kindle application. Features we looked to add to achieve our goal included increased curation and personalization through data visualization, a discussion guide as well as increased social sharing.

Axure Digital Prototype: http://24spmv.axshare.com Video of Prototype: https://paulmoser.tinytake.com/sf/MTc2NjYxXzExMTc0Mzc

G.A. Projects Page

Start Screen

What the user sees when they start the Kindle application.

Browse Books Screen

Here the user can look at titles picked specifically for them, rated by friends and/or recommended by friends.

Fly-out Menu

The user also has a fly-out menu where they can navigate to their Library as well as alter their system settings.

Start Screen

What the user sees when they start the Kindle application.

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Process:

Competitive Analysis We did a competitive analysis of twenty features for six competitors as well a deeper dive into the social structure of three social media sites in order to generate ideas for our proposed functionality.	Concept Map A quick little word cloud exercise to try and generate questions for the very first user interviews we did to kick off this project.	Preliminary User Interviews We posed questions to some eight or nine people and used their feedback as the basis of a User Survey we then put online.
Online User Survey Approximately 120 people answered our survey. We tried to take into account the “Aspects to Consider” from the Project Brief when formulating our questions. This resulting “Survey About Reading” posed questions that we felt were important in developing ideas for creating a more social version of the Kindle app.	Development of Personas In an effort to summarize user research and focus our design efforts on solving user problems, we developed three distinct personas that we felt mirrored the characteristics of our actual users.	Rough Sketching Preliminary sketches designed to get visual ideas down for inclusion in wireframes and prototypes.
User Story Beginning to walk the personas through the application to generate ideas.	User Flows Fleshing out the functionality of the site by having one of the persona use the application and converting the path into application screens.	Multiple Paper Iterations Our prototype went through many iterations, with paths truncated and doubled back on as well.
Preliminary Digital Prototypes Once we started to firm up our paper prototypes, I brought them into Axure to begin developing digital prototypes for Usability Testing.

G.A. Projects Page

PAUL MOSER

UX DESIGNER

Amazon Kindle Application - Socializing the Reading Experience

Challenge: Amazon wants to increase customer engagement by introducing a social aspect to the Kindle application reading experience, allowing readers to comment on and discuss the books they’re reading.

Competitive Analysis

We did a competitive analysis of twenty features for six competitors as well a deeper dive into the social structure of three social media sites in order to generate ideas for our proposed functionality.

Concept Map

A quick little word cloud exercise to try and generate questions for the very first user interviews we did to kick off this project.

Preliminary User Interviews

We posed questions to some eight or nine people and used their feedback as the basis of a User Survey we then put online.

Online User Survey

Development of Personas

In an effort to summarize user research and focus our design efforts on solving user problems, we developed three distinct personas that we felt mirrored the characteristics of our actual users.

Rough Sketching

Preliminary sketches designed to get visual ideas down for inclusion in wireframes and prototypes.

User Story

Beginning to walk the personas through the application to generate ideas.

User Flows

Fleshing out the functionality of the site by having one of the persona use the application and converting the path into application screens.

Multiple Paper Iterations

Our prototype went through many iterations, with paths truncated and doubled back on as well.

Preliminary Digital Prototypes

Once we started to firm up our paper prototypes, I brought them into Axure to begin developing digital prototypes for Usability Testing.