Client Audible.com
Role Interaction Design Lead / Project Lead
Project Sketchbook (Process)
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As part of a larger UI refresh, Audible asked our team to spend 2 weeks rethinking their current browsing and listening experience. Using an established set of UX principles, we developed a few conceptual designs illustrating tactics for evolving the current product experience. The concepts were rooted in key insights gleaned from a consideration of Audible's business objectives as well as, listener needs, behaviors and expectations. Our strategic recommendations included:
Quality, curated merchandising
Signals to customers that the service provider (Audible) has pride, expertise and passion for what they offer their customers. This means having flexible mechanisms in which to visually display and organize books.
Celebrating narrators.
In the world of audiobook, narrators have strong followings. Feature and celebrate them. Provide a place for narrators to cultivate a following and recommend books to the community. Doing so brings people together around common preferences in storytelling style and performance enhancing the overall discovery experience.
Surface the emotion
Surfacing emotional attributes of a story diversifies discovery paths which increases opportunities for serendipity and pleasant surprises throughout the user journey. Diverse discovery keeps content fresh over time which leads to more engaged customers.
Surface the social cadence surrounding a book.
The visual identity of a story isn’t the waveform of sound, it’s the undulation of emotional and social reactions that occur over the course of listening to a story. Providing a way to express this social and emotional dimension conveys more about the story’s character (and the experience of listening to it) than the cover could do alone.
It’s a book club, not a book store
The social exchanges surrounding an Audible book shouldn’t only happen offline. Allow the community to build social circles around the listening experience in which they can experience books together.
Listening is a personal experience
As we listen to stories, those stories become our own each time we encounter a moment that personally touches us. In physical books, we write in the margins or dog ear pages to capture those moments. These marks serve as a reminder of what we learned or experienced in that story. Enable listeners to develop this same type of personal relationship with your audiobooks.