Amazon’s company vision for Kindle is “to make available in less than 60 seconds every book, ever written, in any language, in print or out of print." The Kindle device is an eReader that uses e-Ink technology. Its primary function is reading, though some models feature more tablet-like functionality.

There are 30 million active users in the US alone, with 5x that sold globally (adoption in China is on the rise: 26.1% of Chinese people–around 365 million individuals–have read an ebook over the past year, compared to 23% of the US, it might be worth conducting testing of this feature in the Chinese market).

People connect to their communities at large through sharing stories with each other. We wanted to more deeply understand this connection so that we could leverage what we learn in service of Kindle’s mission. Keeping that in mind, our team developed some goals:

First things first–we need to figure some things out. We began research with competitive and comparative analysis to get a better sense of the eReading industry. We took a feature inventory of eReader devices, as well as other book club hosting sites or sites like Meetup that allow users to create online groups that meet virtually or in person.

Feature and Competitive/Comparative Analysis
We learned that no competing devices in the e-reading space let you have conversations with others within the text of the book itself, and e-reading platforms offered very little functionality specific to club organization, like scheduling meetings or setting group goals. (Book clubbers we talked to turned to sites like Goodreads or Bookclubs.com to fulfill their club management needs)

Through this process we realized that we would need to be prepared to solve for Kindle’s app/website or for the Kindle device itself. Knowing this, I began to study Kindle’s design conventions by recreating screens from the device in order to better understand how pages were constructed.

Ultimately, these constraints were a big reason why we decided to design for the Kindle device itself rather than the Kindle app or desktop site. If we design for the simplest, least powerful hardware then our design should be easy to port to another platform. This led to some technical parameters that we could use later on in our solution:

User Interviews
Next, we needed to talk to some folks to understand how people are reading and book-clubbing currently. We conducted 13 user interviews which revealed some common topics of interest:

1. Need for and difficulty in regular meeting times: 

2. Impulse to elevate group discussion and expand it beyond scheduled meeting time: 

3. User workarounds that solve current pain points: 

4. Love of reading and desire to share the lessons taught by books: 

Let’s sum things up a little, shall we?

Building Personas
Using the results of our research we developed some personas–fictional people who represent a very real group of users. Our team wanted them to feel nuanced enough to accurately represent a believable user, while making their pain points and goals broad enough to ideate a solution that solves for a lot of different users.
Though this process we were able to nail down more clearly which pain points we could solve most effectively while keeping the requirements of the brief in mind. We landed on club scheduling/management, seamless integration into daily life, and keeping engagement high between official club meetings as important topics. These are the resulting personas:

So what's the problem?
We synthesized our interview data into something more meaningful for our research. We did this by grouping quotes and tidbits from our interviews into topic groups that were represented by "I statements". This helped to clarify our research topics and understand what pain points and goals came up the most often for our users. We isolated three main takeaways.

We acknowledged those findings in our final problem statement.

We revealed paths to possible solutions by writing “How might we...” questions. These allow for quick ideation while remembering our person’s needs, goals, and frustrations.

From here it was just a matter of translating those ‘How Might We’s’ into user flows for relevant tasks.

1. Linking an existing bookclub  

2. Leaving and responding to annotations 

3. Setting goals and managing achievements 

Keeping in mind the research and design constraints we found thus far, we developed our solution, Kindle Book Club. Without further ado...

Inline annotation & discussion
This feature allows users to continue having exciting discussion in-between club meetings–while never having to leave the text of the book! We expanded on Kindle’s existing note taking capability by adding the ability for users to respond to annotations in a thread.

Book progess & activity bar
In an effort to keep excitement for reading high, we added an activity bar to Kindle’s native book progress bar. This bar tells the user where they are in the book and how much is left. Adding a visual cue as to the relative activity in a certain book section gets readers excited about what juicy discussion is happening in the part that they haven’t gotten to yet!

Achievements & goals
Who doesn't like a challenge? Achievements and goals can be used to push group members to read just a few pages more, with the potential for incentives in the form of book discounts or other rewards.

In order to get a sense of how the prototype was working, we conducted seven usability tests. We found that a majority of them could complete tasks like linking their club, making a note and replying to a fellow club member’s note without error. 

However, we noticed that users struggled with understanding and finding the book progress and activity bar. If you recall, the bar looks something like this: 

What does it all mean?! We added some checkbox toggles that indicate which group is responsible for the activity level shown. We hadn’t initially included these toggles and users were confused about exactly what metrics the bar was communicating. We went ahead and made this change to help alleviate some of that confusion, particularly as this is a large addition that we made to Kindle’s existing UI.