PRH Volumes - Native Apps
Working with: Matchbox Mobile, & Penguin Random House
Key contributions: Creative strategy, design sprints, information architecture, pitching concepts, wireframes, illustrations & visuals, hand-over, snagging and refinement
Penguin Random House Audio is an industry-facing app with capabilities that allow end-users to preview, download, and listen to audiobooks before publication. As well as access the entire existing PRH audiobook catalog. Working closely with the team at Matchbox Mobile & PRH, my goal was to give the successful but aging Volumes app a complete redesign, including; improving the UX, modernizing the UI, and expanding the feature set.
Strategy
A series of guided workshops with the team at PRH helped us identify the following goals.
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Improve the sign up & validation process, making it easier for users to get started.
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Make PRH Audio the go-to app for discovering audiobooks
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Add features to, and improve the usability of, the playback screen.
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An experience made for professionals, but open to everyone.
These goals were used as our primary focus when putting together the initial creative strategy, which communicated our vision and outlined how we aimed to bring it to life.
Research
Once the initial strategy was approved, we jumped in with research and analysis, using our findings to refine and expand the product strategy. User feedback and analytics from the current PRH Audio application provided some great insights into the user experience pain points, especially around content discoverability and playback functionality.
“The player doesn’t even offer the most basic functions - fast forward, reverse…”
“My search found no titles, and said I should try another search... I tried the search several more times and it FINALLY brings up the title.”
Before starting to design, it was essential to understand the content that the API would provide. We reviewed a random selection of books and noted their data points alongside any points of interest, such as; artwork in an unexpected aspect ratio, missing data points, and unusually long names.
The final part of the research was to understand the user types and how their needs vary. Working with the Vice President of Publicity, we outlined the different user types by industry and role, alongside their access level, fundamental interests, and end goals.
Insights
Our research provided us with the following insights, which we used to refine the initial strategy:
Access: There are different access levels -- ranging from the general public, who have access to a minimal number of complete audiobooks, to PRH staff, who can access the entire library. The process of gaining enhanced access is labor-heavy, starting with an email to the publicity team—this process needs to be streamlined.
Discover: There are three ways users like to discover content-- themed curated lists, browsing by subject, and searching for a specific title or author. Curated lists are essential for marketing and sales on key titles, pointing bloggers, journalists, and buyers toward new and relevant content that might interest them.
Learn: In the original app, the user is shown just the book cover and then has to dive in and out of individual books to find more information. Improving the browsability of the curated lists by providing additional information alongside the cover would likely lead to a higher conversion rate.
Playback: As a minimum, users expect the controls to match those of the other key players within the market, such as Audible and Apple Books. Features such as playback speed and sleep timers are a must. Also, the playback screen features heavily in marketing images and on Instagram, meaning having a large feature image is vital.
These insights we used to create a series of personas that covered the different user types.
Reviewers
Made up of bloggers, influencers & journalists. Need to be driven to new titles that there’s a marketing push for. Although they are interested in the granular detail, they have a lot of content to work through. So speeding up playback and bookmarking key points to revisit later is important to them.
Buyers
Booksellers & librarians who oversee the picking of books to stock. They focus heavily on content discovery, seeking new titles to stock, and gaining inspiration for themed displays. They need to browse through multiple titles in a collection, quickly getting an overview of each book.
General Public
Leisure readers that are accessing free promotional content. They want to be able to promptly sign up to the app, enter their promotional code, and drive straight in to listen. From that point, curiosity should draw them into exploring the app and discovering new PRH Audio content.
Storyboards & Wireframing
User stories were written to cover each feature & persona. For some of the more complex features within the app, these user stories were then translated into storyboards. This ensured that we thoroughly understood the users’ environment and their needs before creating wireframes.
Design System
To maintain consistency, aid efficient development, and ensure a seamless client handover, we created a modular design system. Reusable components were made for key elements such as buttons, tiles/cards, and list items, ensuring every state from loading through to disabled was covered. Each element was designed per PRH brand guidelines, ensuring they met the platform and accessibility requirements.
Outcomes
Access
The new ‘Create an account’ feature allows industry users to sign up in-app rather than a PRH member of staff creating the account for them. Once the account is created, the self-declared industry status can be reviewed and verified by PRH.
Discover
The redesigned ‘Home’ screen prioritizes curated lists, which are bespoke to the user. The previous scrollable lists, which gave little context, have been replaced with tiles. Each tile includes three hero book covers, a title, and a summary, giving users context and helping them decide if a list is worth reviewing.
Curated Lists
PRH create curated lists to highlight relevant content to users; this could be anything from seasonal collections of books to a list of award nominees. Previously, it displayed as a scrollable list of book covers that the user needed to dive in and out of. In the redesign, a new swipeable view was introduced that provided users with a summary of each book, encouraging them not to judge a book by its cover.
Search
Browse
Listen
We listened to customer requests for more controls and added; sleep timers, playback speed, and casting. While also ensuring maximum artwork size for all the all-important Instagram screenshots.
Before
After
After
Before
New - Swipe-able review
Redesigned - List view
Learn
The book details page was given a sleek new design, with its layout tweaked to ensure it could support all information types. We also added a ‘favorites’ feature allowing users to create a list of books they like without downloading the whole book.
After
Before
Browse
Previously an infinite scroll of books. We’ve added feature categories such as ‘New this week’ and ‘Coming soon’. To highlight new content to users and create a more user-friendly browsing experience.
