Research

I started with a hypothesis that users struggled with a lack of organization options afforded to them by Audible and that my dad wasn’t just an edge case.

Reddit’s r/audible subreddit appeared to be the focal point of the online community, so it was my main source for user-generated information and a good place to start validating my hypothesis. The most common pain point that arose was a lack of a ‘folders’ option, or the ability to sort by series or genre. One user claimed to have quit the service because their library had become unmanageable.

I posted a survey on r/audible aimed at understanding the problem space better. I used a combination quantitative and qualitative data to better understand listener attitudes, organizational habits, and pain points.

130 responses showed that while many users expressed intense frustration with the lack of organization features currently available, quite a few users didn’t care at all.

In order to develop my understanding of user pains on a deeper level, I then conducted 3 interviews with current Audible users. These interviews showed that:

The 2 participants were frustrated with a lack of organizational options while 1 did not care at all. For the participants who did care, it was critical that they would be able to control what type of categories their books where sorted into.

With research-backed validation that a lack of organization option was indeed a real problem for users, I conducting a competitive analysis of the current audiobook market to see what solutions had already been designed. Currently, there are no competitors that provide a feature that allows users to create AND easily manage folders or categories of their audiobooks. With no good solutions currently in existence, Audible has a major opportunity to increase the UX of their product and further increase their competitive advantage in the audiobook market.

Empathize & Define

After confirming my hypothesis, I wanted to synthesize the specific goals, needs, and frustrations of Audible users. To do this, I constructed two personas based on my research.

Katie became my primary persona and represented users who had over 50 books in their library and who experienced frustrations around not being able to organize their libraries in a personal and meaningful way.

Nick, on the other hand, represented users with smaller libraries and who valued ease of use and functionality over organization. These personas showed me how critical it would be for me to make design decisions that would help Katie achieve her goals without hindering Nick’s experience.