Audicious
Improving the audiobook app experience
Overview
My Role
Duration
Sector
UX/UI Designer
5 weeks design challenge
Information, Entertainment
Audicious is a white label audiobook app I designed in 5 weeks with the following brief in mind:
Audiobooks and podcasting are the fastest-growing audio segments on mobile. Users who listen to audiobooks don’t enjoy the benefits of dog-earing pages, highlighting excerpts or leaving notes on their favourite pages… they also lose the nostalgic aspects of owning a book and watching it age. This leaves a lot to be desired from the audio experience on mobile.
I set out on this personal project to design an audiobook app that can be highly personal, highly interactive, and with the ability to bring even more utility to the user than a book ever could.
From research, data synthesis, facilitating co-design workshop, wireframes and usability testing up until presenting a prototype - I created Audicious the audiobook app.
Project Table of Contents
1. Discovering what are the audiobook users' concerns?
At the start of this journey, I hypothesised this problem statement to help kickstart my research direction:
A time-poor audiobook listener who feels annoyed that they can’t note-take easily to save their notations about the passage.
From desktop research into market trends, competitor analysis and others, I followed up with user research.
56 Online Survey Respondants
8 One-to-one Interviews
All of those data was put together into an affinity map and then further sorted into an empathy map.
Sorted data in Affinity Map (left) and Empathy Map (right)
Research Insights:
Lost Concentration
53% of survey respondents
found it difficult to concentrate whilst listening.
"drawback to listening to audiobooks is that it’s harder to realise when you are not paying attention or half-listening."
Different Narrators
51% of survey respondents
would have a negative listening experience if they had a bad narrator.
Listeners would like to be able to choose preferred narration. Bad narration detracts from enjoying the listening experience. So they want "more audio books with a cast of narrators".
Missed Content
2 in 5 of participants
had difficulties relating to content format.
"It’s hard to master spellings."
"I find a lot with non-fiction books is that it refers to diagrams or extra materials that are relied on and I can't see it, because it is an audiobook."
As a result of all the research, I found I had to change my initial problem statement which focused on note-taking. It wasn’t addressing more key issues regarding concentration loss.
Revised problem statement:
A time-poor audiobook listener who feels frustrated that they are losing concentration whilst listening.
2. Building empathy
To build empathy with the main user groups, I created this main persona - Catherine Harris (30, working professional).
Main persona - Catherine Harris
This customer journey map was created so that I can better understand how Catherine went about using the audiobook app in a busy environment. I mapped out her thoughts and feelings at each stage of her various interactions with an audiobook app.
Catherine Harris' Customer Journey Map
A major pain point was when she lost track of where she was in the audiobook. She was feeling a lot of frustration when trying to find the missed content.
Focusing on insights, I reframed the pain points into How Might We questions so that I can concentrate on design solutions around the topics of Concentration, Interaction and Personalisation.
How Might We?
Concentration
How might we assist users so that they'll be less likely to lose concentration whilst listening?
Interaction
How might we improve app interactions for the users in different environments and scenarios?
Personalisation
How might we increase personalisation in experiences so that users will feel more attached?
3. Ideation
I collaborated with 6 other participants in an ideation workshop to generate as many solutions as possible for Catherine's pain points.
Afterwards I went to map out solutions in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) map to see how feasible and valuable they are.
Crazy 8s ideas (left), Ideation workshop photo (centre), MVP Map (right)
4. Wireframes and prototypes
Here are some sketches and wireframes as I explored layouts and features for the prototype.
Lo-fi design sketches (left), Mid-fi wireframes (right)
4.1. Style guide
Before hi-fi wireframes, I created this type guide so that I can have uniformity throughout the app.
5. Usability testings
User test notes
Usability testings was very important in helping me refine the prototype. I found it especially interesting how slight changes to text or design decisions can improve app interactions greatly.
It was interesting to note that certain terms I thought were understandable had uncertain meanings to them when tested with different users.
Example -
'Pitch range' was not as understandable compared to 'Vocal range'.
6. Hi-fi prototype
Home
Cover art and user icon image at the top will be customisable in account settings.
Recommendations banner will have a selection of audiobooks displayed based on user's current listening trends.
Audiobook Player
The background of the audiobook player would be dynamic.
It should give the eyes something interesting to look as eyes tend to be drawn to things in motion.
Chapter List
Chapter list will have sections of synopsis.
User will have to click on the chapter's synopsis icon to bring out the synopsis. By hiding away the content, they won't be spoiled by further reading unless they wanted to know.
Timers and Alarms
Timer and Alarm feature where users can set up how they would like to be alerted.
Be it vibration, or soft sound whilst the audiobook is playing. Users can set up alarm schedules to go off whilst using the app.
One usability tester commented here that it is certainly a very handy function to have. She herself had missed train stops by being too absorbed in the audiobooks or from doing other things.
Player Settings
Player settings with two key features based on Catherine's pain points.
Adaptive volume levels - if option is selected, the audiobook app will automatically adjust volume based on ambient noise levels in the surroundings.
Vocal range - Changing narrator's vocal range is possible! Or keep it default with narrator's voice not adjusted.
Library
Library section showing user's audiobook collection.
Multiple ways to sort the audiobooks.
Icons in middle section are the tile view or text line views. Text line view is for the scenario where users have too many books and get a bit overwhelmed by cover art.
7. Next steps, conclusion and reflections
In the future, it would be interesting to conduct research into how audiobook users notate and comment. There are also some insights showing users would like integrations and interactions with audiobook community.
I have learnt a lot throughout this project about phrasing questions to get more astute answers. It is very important to eliminate unconscious bias when designing, and plenty of research certainly helps with validating the design solutions!
When facilitating the co-design workshops, there were certainly a period of time where I felt it wasn’t running smoothly due to my inexperience with phrasing the case study properly. With more practise in presenting and asking the right questions, the co-design workshop might have generated more targeted ideas. A reminder to myself for next time, practise a lot more and if possible have another person check if they were understanding it properly before hosting the workshop.
From addressing the problem statements and How Might We questions, the Audicious audiobook app has fulfilled the criteria. However there is still a lot to be done, as there needs more research into developing a functioning experience of changing the narrator's vocal range and implementations of other features.