In 2019, Audible underwent a major change in team structure. Previously, teams had been divided based on surface (e.g. iOS, Android, web). While this allowed for fast and autonomous work streams, it also led to division in customer experience and coverage of releases. As a result, Audible restructured its teams into experience-based and highly collaborative streams, such as discovery, library, and player.
After the restructuring, the next step was to rethink our services from the ground up and make changes that would have long-term benefits. Historically we've known 2 issues that have troubled our development:
It's costly and slow to make universal updates to all platforms at once. Customers encountered friction between platforms.
Invested new features can't be launched or launched but poorly received. Customers are unaware or misunderstand intention behind new features.
Business might lose returning customers and chance to acquire new. Customers get frustrated and lose trust for business.
Business develops loyalty from customers. Customers continuously have pleasant and unique experiences.
There were a few metrics that the team wanted to move, including lifting:
The goal is to make the overall engagement better when it comes to all listening related activities.
The new Information architecture was well-received by leadership and the broader teams. It was leveraged in the design of Audible Captions that was launched in late 2019.
There were a lot of UI / interaction components developed throughout this process that became actual guidelines in our UI library, used across mobile apps and web.
The first step we took was understanding the problem by gaining an in-depth understanding of our customers, our service, and the market. This helped us identify the critical areas to focus on and the reasoning behind them.
Based on the research results from the previous step, we scoped this redesign into three focus areas: information architecture, content navigation, and sleep experiences. Each of these areas addressed severe customer pain points and had a high business impact.By narrowing our focus to these three areas, we were able to start developing solutions independently, even though they were interconnected. This helped us scope our work in a concrete way and logically divide our resources.
To validate all the ideas we visualized, we tested both internally and externally. With users, we did rounds of interviews and showed prototypes for them to react to. Then we optimized designs accordingly. By doing this repetitively, we were able to get to a set of solutions that received positive feedback and outlook from users.
The new IA was well-received by leadership and the broader teams. The developed IA was leveraged in the design of Audible Captions that was launched in late 2019.
There were a lot of UI / interaction components developed throughout this process that became actual guidelines in our UI library, used across mobile apps and web.
Historically UX, design system and research worked on feature basis and in short cycles. This was a rare collaboration that three teams worked from research, design to user test altogether and the results were successful. It set up a new standard for rest of the org.
This initiative was a rare one that went through extensive research to prototyping and user tests. The robust insights and outcomes were impressive to the org. It became a powerful evidence and whenever other teams needed to tackle big and uncertain initiatives, they were able to reference.
