Audible
Adding a feature
Role// UX/UI Design
Year// 2024
Background
I’m a big reader. More specifically a big listener to audio books, as I’m a huge fan of the multi tasking capability they present. One thing I noticed though, despite my frequent listening habits, is that I’d never personally paid for an Audible subscription. Over the years I’ve borrowed accounts from those willing to share their passwords with me, and this got me thinking: Is there some feature I might add to get me to pay for an account? Or better yet, get even more people to happily subscribe? In the following case study I will my process and design for an added feature for the program known as Audible.
Audible is a podcast, audiobook, and other audio media content service that allows its users to purchase, download, and listen to all sorts of content. It boasts a variety of different subscription levels to suit its customers needs and budgets, as well as a website and an app to allow free range of use. It is currently owned by Amazon.
Goals
The goal is to add a function that decreases the number of users sharing one account, and therefore increases the total number of users. This will be done through the creation of some sort of loan or rental feature through the app, allowing users to access a work for a shorter period of time at lower personal cost.
Problem
Audible loses customers through the inflexibility of its ability to share. Unlike a physical book, consumers are unable to loan books to one another, leading to people to share one account rather than subscribe to their own.
There is also no ability to rent a book for a short period of time, like you can with Amazon’s movie and tv services. This is yet another fault that leads consumers to share one account.
Impact
For this project I confirmed the need for such a project through research and user testing to create this product as a solo designer.
Research
While I came into the project with an idea in mind, I had to do the research to see if there was indeed a hole for my idea to fill.
Goals
The points that I sought to clarify in my research:
Understand if audible users actively sharing accounts
Learn if users are utilizing any alternative platforms
Learn what could push non paying users to subscribe to a paid account
Secondary Research
Spotify
Spotify's mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it.
Search functions not optimized for books.
Large pre-existing audience.
Google Books
Google seeks to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Not a well known feature.
No monthly fee encourages new users.
Chirp
Chirp is a service that lets you get amazing limited-time deals on select digital audiobooks. All books you purchase are yours to keep, and, unlike many other audiobook services, there's no monthly subscription fees or minimum purchases.
Difficult to browse by author or series.
No monthly fee encourages new users.
Findings
Secondary research showed that Audible is definitely a powerhouse in this space. While it does have some competitors, it’s definitely leading the way in terms of audio book services. It’s got the name recognition, the large existing customer base through amazon, and the largest collection. While they do have some competitors offering better prices, they lack greatly in one or all of these areas.
Primary Research
To start I conducted five interviews over video calls with people from my target audience:
Ages 20-60
Has used an employee portal or worked with a non-profit
Methods
The methods that I would use to answer these questions:
Secondary research through analysis of competitive and pre-existing businesses in the same market
Primary research by way of in depths interviews and surveys across a larger audience
From these, I found the following series of reoccurring issues:
Many users share accounts in some capacity
Users who are unwilling to pay for membership either use alternative apps or use a friends account
Majority expressed a desire to be able to share audio books more easily with their friends
Synopsis
With my primary and secondary research complete, the issue that needed to be solved became clear. While many users shared the desire to share their books with friends, there’s no good way to go about this on Audible. Because of these, they’ll end up sharing accounts so that each person doesn’t need to buy the same book again.
In addition, while many users were utilizing another audio program, Audible was recognized as being both the easiest to use and having the best selection. Really, the only thing driving people away was the fact that they didn’t feel the perks of the subscription were worth it. What would we have to add then, to make it worthwhile?
Define
The first step within the define process was to take all of my findings and boil them down into two essential statements: A ‘point of view’ statement and a ‘how might we’ statement.
POV Statement
I’d like to discover ways to allow Audible subscribers to loan and borrow books from their friends to avoid account sharing.
Next I needed to define my user a little bit better so that during my design process I had someone I could look at and ask myself, “Would this person use my product?“
User Personas
After compiling all of the information that I had gathered from my research, interviews, and survey I created two user personas to reference during my ideation to stay on track.
User Flow
High Value
Low Value
Next on the docket was user flows, the task of mapping out all of the possibilities for different tasks a user might person on the website from start to finish.
User Flow: Borrowing a book
Meet Carla, the thrifty bookworm who’s hesitant to subscribe.
Carlas is a content creator in San Francisco on a budget.
She doesn’t like paying for anything unnecessary she doesn’t have to, but wants to listen to books her friends recommend.
She would be more willing to pay for Audible if it had more paid features she was interested in.
Meet Thomas, the series junkie who wants to share.
Thomas is an active Audible subscriber already and has a family account that allows some sharing, but he wishes he was able to share with friends as well.
He owns an extensive audio book collection for his favorite author and keeps trying to convince his friends to listen to them. He wishes sharing an audio book was just as easy as loaning a book to a friend.
Now that I knew who I was designing for and what general problem I was trying to solve, it was time to think of some solutions.
Brainstorming
After all of this research one feature to add stood out to me the greatest: the ability to borrow books. If audible is trying to recreate the experience of physical books, why shouldn’t one be able to share an audio book with a friend like they could a physical book? This immediately made sense to me as an feature to add to help their business. Currently their main competitors have the advantage of lower price to drive customers too them, so if Audible wants their customers to continue paying, they’ll need to consider upping the desirability of a paid subscri
Ideate
Now I know who this is for and vaguely what I want it to be, so from there I have to figure out features! What exactly is it I need to be deigning for?
Feature Set
With all of my features brainstormed, I organized them by level of importance to help me decide what were my priorities in building the feature.
Low Effort
Find friends
Add friends
Friends list
Profile personalization
Comments section
Loan a book
Borrow a book
Shared library
Book sorting
Good reads integration
High Effort
Design
Next step from there is to begin designing the different screens.
Sketches
As I began my rough sketches, I started out by drawing screens that already exist within the Audible app to get a feel for their formatting and UI.
This helped me to get a better understanding of their design conventions and apply them to the new screen that I would need to create.
I followed along closely to their formatting as I sketched with the hope that in the end it would all flow together seamlessly and the user would hardly know the feature was new.
Hi-Fi Prototype
After my sketches, I did a brief round of lo-fi iterations of my designs before moving onto the hi-fi. I knew I was going to need to pixel for pixel recreate some pre-existing screens from the app to make my prototype functional, so I had my work cut out for me.
Test
With my design completed and my prototype complete, I had to do user testing to make sure my feature was functional, understandable, and something that people would utilize.
User Testing
For my user testing I gathered together five different users to test my main flow that I’d structured my prototype for, borrowing a book. It was important to me to have a working prototype for this phase rather than just my high fidelity screens, as I find details can be easily missed when simple scrolling screen by screen.
Methodology
In person moderated usability testing
Remote moderated usability testing
Tasks
Borrowing a book
Success Metrics
Task Success
Task Completion
Time
User Confidence
Error Rate
Task Difficulty
Feedback
The overwhelming reaction to this added feature was positive. Both of the tasks were rated as being easy to complete and each of the testers was able to complete them with minimal problems. They liked how it was integrated with the pages that already exist, keeping the process simple and familiar since it’s so similar to purchasing. All participants agreed that this was a feature that they would use in real life, and those not actively subscribed said that this feature would get them to start paying for their own account again.
There were no major issues that any of the testers ran into, but a few different questions and concerns. There was a privacy concern with who is able to see your name in loaning and borrowing information, some concerns about the waitlist button being clear enough, and some of the naming conventions used. Each of these concerns will be addressed in the next round of iterations.
Iteration
No first draft is perfect, so armed with the information from my testing I went about the editing process.
Editing
Starting with the easier complaint, unclear language, I made some edits in my various pop ups and through out the loaning process to make everything clearer. Some of the language I had used initially didn’t make the process fully clear.
The second edit, something I hadn’t even thought about before my users brought it up, was privacy. What if a book my friend has put up for loan is being borrowed by someone I don’t know? If they don’t want their name public, how will that appear? To combat this I made different versions of the loan details:
One where I am friend with the hypothetical Susan Murkle…
And one where I am not.
While all of my edits for this project boiled down to editing text, the feedback I got from my testing was incredibly helpful, as the issues it brought up were very real and something I may not have realized on my own.
Conclusion
Working on this project was a great experience in having to closely mimic and recreate the style of an application that already exists was great practice for me. I was able to utilize different tools to help in recognizing fonts, recreating logos and other UI elements. By the end of the project my recreated screens were nearly indistinguishable from the screenshots I had taken.