The Anti-Clickbait App.

Reinventing the classic storytelling experience and providing quality nonfiction stories

Providing a transformational form of entertainment, Alexander wanted to reinvent the classic storytelling experience via a platform and service to house high-quality nonfiction stories, written by world-famous writers and voice narrators, paired with beautiful videos and imagery with famous actors and actresses.  (website)

Role: User Research, Competitive Analysis, Product Strategy

The Ask

“The overall goal of the app is to get the reader to the reading experience and improve the reading experience itself.” 

Present some ideas & a list of best practices to build the most user friendly, approachable, and engaging non-fiction LF reading platform possible.

So I started by asking a TON of questions which directed me to two problems

1. How do people read? What’s The history of reading & storytelling (like back to pre-historic times).

2. How were stories told? Passed down? Digested?

3. How do people interact with written text? Is that different on digital vs. on paper?

4. Why do people read? In what circumstances will they pay to read?

5. What’s been done? (Competitive research) - e-readers (Kindle, The Nook), reading apps (iBooks), non fiction stories (NY Times) Why were these decisions made?

6. What does it mean to be anti-clickbait?

The Problems

The audience was defined too broadly.

Although the audience has been established as anyone who can read English and has access to a smartphone, I realized that a user wouldn’t really download this app unless you already somewhat liked reading or wanted to get into reading after doing some initial research.

Book lovers prefer the physical reading experience over digital.

It was official. After scouring pages of comments, blogs, and discussion panels all over the internet the internet, book lovers adamantly loved reading physical books over reading digital. In fact, the reason why so many of them enjoyed Amazon’s Kindle was the “soft touch” screen (much like that of a physical book) and lack of glare (like reading from a physical page).

The Solution

Privacy

Human Insight: There’s a really deep culture of shame built around reading EVEN for those supposed “good readers”. People are ashamed because:

• They’re not reading for fun/they’ve never learned to like reading.

• They’re not reading the “right things”, ie. by being fans of sci-fi, fantasy, and erotica genres

• They’re not reading enough. Every day, these “good readers” are surrounded by lists of books they should be reading and they just can’t get through it all.

What this looks like as a feature:

• Resist the temptation to “build a community” a la Medium or Facebook. Notes should be kept private and not shared with other users.

• Possibly build features that encourage/motivate readers to come as they are and keep reading

Note Taking, Legibility, Marking

Human Insight: Part of a personal reading experience is being able to manipulate your book as you please (dog-earring, bookmarking, note-taking, etc.). For digital that translates to writing/highlighting whatever you want.

Features:

• People use e-readers and apps for what books can’t do. Notes should be exportable & compiled in one space 1 2

• Fonts impact how seriously people process content; Test the custom font & several others to see what affects retention rate

Geographical Reading

Human Insight: We geographically place scenes or lines of a book in our minds. We can remember reading a certain plot point and where it was geographically on a page (ex. bottom left hand corner)

Features:

• “Progress bar” of sorts at the bottom of the page that lets people know how far along they are in a book (both length & story-wise)