Kobo is an app that provides readers to purchase and read ebooks and audiobooks.
Design better note-taking features for audiobooks’ readers.
UX/UI Design
User Research
2 months
Kobo is an app that provides readers to purchase and read ebooks and audiobooks.
It is of great significance to meet the needs of audiobooks. First of all, it can not only bring more complete services to readers. In addition, there are many ebook platforms in the Asian market at present; therefore, optimising this essential function can make it more competitive.
• Take notes directly
• Select chapters quickly
• Adjust fast forward and rewind time by sentence
Hypothesis
By optimising the audiobook interface and adding note-taking functions, readers can complete their reading in one system, making the process of listening to audiobooks more systematic and straightforward.
Why is it important to optimise audiobooks?
According to Kobo’s 2020 reader analysis report in Taiwan, audiobook readers are increasing along with the popularity of podcasts. This trend shows that people have begun to adopt different ways of receiving information and reading books, and Kobo also stated that they plan to expand the audiobook market.
However, despite the popularity of audiobooks in recent years, many readers shared their frustration when listening to Kobo audiobooks, especially with the note-taking function. To solve this issue, it is necessary to modify its interface and functions. If the issue can be solved successfully, Kobo products will become more competitive and it will likely become a leader in the e-book industry.
Business opportunities
• Better listening experience: Provide readers with a holistic listening experience.
• Simplify audiobook functions: Enable readers to edit and manage audio and notes with ease.
• Generate more readers: Increase potential audiobook readers
I did competitive analysis first, then collected the feedbacks of audio service and conducted interviews.
Step 1: Competitive analysis
Step 2: Collect audiobook user feedback
Step 3: Conduct interviews
Competitive analysis
This project is aimed at the audiobook market in Taiwan, where is still a novel industry. Currently, the leading brands include Kobo, Books.com.tw, Readmoo, HyRead and KKBOX. By benchmarking, only Kobo and Readmoo provide relatively complete listening services. And Kobo, among the two, has a more extensive audiobook collection.
Collect audiobook user feedback
I observed and collected the users’ frequent problems with audiobooks in the Kobo readers club. Then, I made a statistics and found the most problems are:
• Readers cannot take notes on the audiobooks they bought.
• Some audiobooks are without the table of contents.
• Cannot customise how many seconds to rewind and fast-forward.
• Since audiobook is one of the sub-genre of e-book, it’s difficult to find them.
Interview
After identifying the readers’ main concerns, I designed the interview outline to better understand the readers’ listening habits and situations.I chose 3 interviewees who have listened to at least two books on Kobo. After interviewing them, I organised an empathy map to determine which steps influenced experienced readers to listen to audiobooks.
The interview questions included:
• Their listening habits (when do the users use Kobo, how long they use each time and their frequency of use).
• The note-taking process when listening to audiobooks.
• Their experience of listening to books on the Kobo App.
• They were also asked to demonstrate their listening procedure.
After the investigation and in-depth interviews with three users, I found that the main problem they faced when using the audiobook service is the followings:
• Scattered notes: Taking notes and listening to audiobooks cannot be done on the same platform. Users have to switch back and forth when taking notes, which is not very user-friendly. Furthermore, this makes it difficult for the users to organise and categorise their notes.
• Take a lot of time to organise: Because not every audiobook provides the script, readers can only record the seconds or screenshots first and then replay and organise the content later, making completing the notes extremely inconvenient and time-consuming.
• Time adjustment is inflexible: At present, users can only fast-forward/rewind the content in a fixed number of seconds, they have to adjust the progress bar frequently to find the sentence they’re looking for.
Create and adjust new functions based on the playback interface that the users are familiar with.
• Save quotes in both audio and text format: Readers can choose to save the quotes in audio or text format.
• Highlight content: The text will highlight the sentence being read so that readers can easily recognise the content when switching to the text version and select the required range of notes.
• Fast-forward and rewind by sentence: Instead of a second, a sentence is the basic unit of forwarding/rewinding, making it easier for users to switch to the part that they like to replay.
Wireframe
Prototype
Style
Test
Users gave positive feedback on being able to save quotes in audio and text format. This improvement successfully solves their difficulties when taking notes on audiobooks.
Due to concerns related to the storage for audio quotes, at present, an audio quote cannot exceed one minute. However, I believe the time limit for audio quote should be extended. In order to solve the storage problem, “bookmarks” will be a good way for users to highlight the important parts during the reading process, without taking up any of their storage space.
In addition to the note-taking function for audiobook services, they also look forward to optimising other services, such as a more convenient query.
