Background / Context

Role: Designer - Contract
Tools: Sketch, Adobe XD
Duration: April 2013 - June 2012
Platform: Kindle Fire

As part of a consulting project, members of the Amazon Kindle team presented us with challenges and questions that they had been working on, specifically regarding opportunities for improvement in the Kindle user experience. The question my team chose to pursue, was: within the reading experience of a Kindle Fire device, how can customers view X-Ray content inline without taking the reader away like we do today? This served as the foundation for our investigation and idea developments.

Problem

Although X-Ray is a powerful concept, there are a lot of inherent issues holding it back. These issues mainly involve problems with usability functions and operations. From meetings with the Kindle team and internal analysis, we identified three main issues (1) Spoilers, in particular the ability to fix the character frequency chart’s chance of ruing the storyline. (2) In-line viewing content. Currently the system pulls the reader away from the book into a new interface to access the “X-Ray” feature. (3) Editable X-Ray content. Character biographies, along with definitions, are not editable and rely on third party sources like Shelfari and/or Wikipedia.

Sketching & Wireframes

Solution

X-Ray mode is highly interactive, and it was our goal to maintain this level of user engagement. We did a series sketches, whiteboarding, and iterative prototyping, before I took our work online and created the final, interactive Axure prototype. Our solution includes the option of having X-Ray enabled inline while allowing more social readers to utilize discussion boards and take notes.

To activate X-Ray, simply swipe two fingers down on the screen. This will highlight the people, places, and things of the book as well as passages highlighted by the reader’s friends. To learn more about a person, place, or thing the reader taps the highlighted text and the screen splits to give an inline description. Our concept ensures the reader is not taken away from his/her book, and enhances the social reading experience for users of the Kindle Fire.

Final Prototype

Watch the video below for an in-depth walk through

XRAY Reimagined from Andy Peraza on Vimeo.

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