Solid State UX

Catalyst Group, who published a comparative usability study of eReaders in 2009, knows a lot more about eBook user experience than I do.

Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a panel discussion for Digital Book World called Reader Experience and eBooks: What UX Experts can Teach Digital Publishers. (A free webcast!) One of the points I’ll be making is that eBooks are only a part of the digital publishing landscape, even a fairly minor one up until now.  On balance, web publishing has been a far more important source of digital revenue for Wiley, and also is generally perceived as the area in which to evolve whole new product lines and revenue streams away from the print business. This seems to be changing as the eBook technologies and web technologies are converging, but still web publishing gets the lion’s share of investment in the sort of customer experience work that I do.  In fact, those of us with technologically focused jobs in the publishing business are practically mandated to break apart the very concept of the book.  It is an informal mantra around here that we don’t just want to put the book online, we want to create a value added service, get deeper into the customer’s workflow.  It comes up on every project.   We are not in the book business anymore, we are in a broader content and services business.  It is the status quo way to talk about digital if you are a person of ambition in the book business.

I’m the Director of User Experience at a major book publisher and have never been involved in design or user research directly related to an eBook. Perhaps it is because eBooks are quite unembarrassed about being based on books, and I’ve been conditioned not to think about books.  This simple association (the word “book” is in the title, afterall) may have caused me to pigeonhole eBooks as a format (think PDF) and not a platform for innovation (think, the Internet or the iPad).  I was impressed with my fellow panelist Brett Sandusky’s description of how the book proposal process is evolving over at Kaplan. He writes, in a UX Matters article he posted back in January, “Our book proposals look nothing like book proposals.  In fact, each day they resemble functional specs more and more.”   According to Sandusky, the teams at Kaplan are interdisciplinary and intra-departmental from the earliest stages in the publishing workflow, from when the book ideas themselves are coming together.

We create our fair share of functional specs at Wiley, not to mention wireframes and other UX deliverables, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this process done for a book idea.  Usually the book is planned, produced, and sold and the digital ideas that hit our central technology group (where I work) are either completely separate or are created downstream as a form of “line extension” of the print product.   The exception to this, and it is a very long-standing exception, is when the editorial content of the book has a technological component or supplement, in which case the functional bits are planned along with the print product itself.   You’ve seen this sort of thing in textbooks for the past quarter of a century, for instance in the form of a CD-ROM with some extra problems or animations or a quiz on it that comes shrink-wrapped with the book.   This type of development is generally handled in-house by a special “media editor,” who sits in the editorial division but works with a wide variety of technology and design specialists, both internal and external, depending on the nature of the development work.  The CD-ROM has gradually morphed into a “book companion website,” and, now, book companion websites are morphing back into the book in the form of “enhanced” eBooks.

In the central technology group, it is rare that I or my team work on an individual title.  Usually we work on a broad platform, on a capability for an entire imprint or product line, or some other digital business idea that encompasses a wider swath of business than a single book title. This is partly a question of revenue (most books have small budgets), and partly a question of where we think our UX design efforts will have the most impact.

So why has there not been a lot of thought put into eBooks so far from the in-house UX team? One reason is that the eBook formats themselves are quite limited in what can be done with them.  It would be difficult to enforce a design principle uniformly across all of the competing device formats such as Kindle, iOS, Nook, not to mention legacy desktop eBook technologies like those from Vitalsource, the company behind Wiley Desktop Editions, and DRM controlled Adobe PDFs.   The various formats have nowhere near the level of standardized presentation conventions as web browsers do, and this means a publisher has to give up a fair amount of control over the reading experience itself in exchange for having their content available in as many locations as possible.   This is a fundamental trade-off.  In a Frommers travel guide, for instance, the print books make thoughtful use of wayfinders, icons, color photos, call-out boxes, and annotated maps – most of which are not available in a reflowable eBook such as those that appear on a Kindle or Nook.  But this is changing as I type this, with significant development efforts underway to add enhanced features to increase the usability of this type of content.

A Frommers book makes extensive use of color photographs, wayfinding devices such as the colored side-tabs, and interactive maps and icons.

Frommers content in a reflowable eBook format. Stripping out the content's design has made it less usable. Managing this balance between content presentation and the affordances of the eReader devices is at the heart of the eBook's future user experience.

This leads to the obvious question of why be on a platform where we can’t control the user experience?  The answer is equally obvious: a publisher is generally not looking to limit the formats a book is available in – the more, the better.  As people’s reading habits change (going from print to Kindle, for instance), it’s important to keep your content and your brand where your customers want to consume their information.  And customers who are excited about their devices are surprisingly forgiving of a challenging user experience – at least at first.  As these devices evolve and get more and more capabilities, publishers will have to invest more in usable electronic content.

It is such a daunting challenge to think about developing and distributing a consistent user experience across all these formats, in fact, that most publishers are content to resign this work to their print production people – not user experience designers.    The basic workflow is such.  Manuscripts, in the form of MS Word documents, are laid out in InDesign with specific instructions to the typesetter for use in preparing the book. The typesetter delivers web-optimized ePDFs that preserve the exact layout of the print book.  Once the print PDFs are approved and sent off to the printer, the typesetter then bundles them up in a variety of standardized XML formats for distribution across the various electronic channels – Wiley’s own XML for the web, MOBI and ePUB for eReaders, and proprietary formats such as the one Amazon uses for the Kindle.

Depending on the affordances of the particular electronic format, the publisher can include or exclude properties that the print book design may have had.  And this is the rub.  For instance, most eBook formats are “reflowable,” which means the book’s pagination and page layout is not applicable.  Some “enhanced” eBook formats, on the other hand, are quite elaborate, like the Apple iPad edition of Ryu Murukami’s book, which was released straight to the iPad in app form, jam packed with cool transitions, sound effects, arty layouts and DVD-style extras. (This event triggered many resounding predictions of death to traditional publishers as a result, despite that fact that it is in Japanese language only and contains what is essentially a straightforward paginated eBook at its heart.  The potential shake-up is, of course, that Murukami didn’t need a big publishing company to release his book to the iPad, only Apple’s approval.)

Murukami's The Singing Whale was released straight to the iPad.

What would I focus on if I did work on eBooks?  Well, lets talk a little about the usability of eBooks themselves.   For a certain type of experience, a linear text-based one, eBooks are downright dreamy.   “The technology is built for romance novels,” a veteran publisher told me.  “They do a great job of serving up row after row of text.”  This may explain why some of the Kindle’s initial demographic success was not with your typical high-tech gadget early adopter crowd.   Anecdotal evidence would point more towards the moms-on-vacation set.  50% of Kindle users were over 50 in 2009, and 70% over 40.   The electrophoretic, e-Ink displays are great poolside, even in bright sun.  And besides connoting fabulous retirements revisiting the classics on the beach, e-Readers are also great assistive technology, providing tremendous benefits for arthritic hands and impaired eyes.

But the eReader is more mainstream technology every year, and if you count the electronic reading that occurs on phones and tablets, it’s not long until they reach near ubiquity.  It is the obvious benefits of not being in print that are driving electronic book sales – the ease of getting updated content, the ability to annotate and take notes, the fact that it’s often cheaper than the print version, and the most obvious benefit of all, portability (note: the combined physical weight of just two of the books currently on my iPhone, Atlas Shrugged and The Wealth of Nations, would be 4.7 pounds if I were to carry even the smallest paperback editions and not the Kindle editions.)

eReaders, with their resizable text and text-to-speech features, are brilliant assistive technology.

From a user experience point of view, the benefits more or less end there.  For one thing, the underlying concept still has a sizable army of detractors.  eReaders give many people the feeling of putting just too much technology in their lives.  When a book goes electronic, it feels like the electronics are intruding into a sphere into which they don’t belong.   New York interaction designer, Chris Fahey, writing about he and his wife’s resistance to digital books back in 2007, mused “We both grew up surrounded by the printed word — looking at them, feeling them, smelling them — and we intend for our family to continue in that tradition.”

And Fahey makes his living designing user experiences for digital products.   “I’m not going to say much about Kindle,” Fahey wrote. “As an iPhone owner, I find both the device and the service colossally dumb.”

Collegehumor.com mocked the very idea of refactoring books on electronic devices with their spoof ad for a (then not yet released) Kindle 3, in which the device basically plays the Hollywood movie version of a book, complete with crisp color video and Dolby surround sound (the signature line, uttered from a headphone wearing kid over the explosive sounds of The Fast & The Furious:  “I can’t hear you. I’m reading!”)

The Library of Chris "I don't need no stinkin' Kindle" Fahey. Fahey's point is that books aren't just a technology. A person's library reflects their lives and values.

But those predictions of the Kindle’s failure that were written circa 2007 and 2008 sound pretty hollow now.  In 2009 Amazon heavily promoted the news that their digital sales had eclipsed their print sales.  And by 2009, the Kindle was a clear success with estimated sales close to half a million units and projected sales in 2010 of almost a billion dollars.  This NYTimes essay attributed the Kindle’s success to making it really, really easy to use.  But is it?

Nick Gould released some eReader usability research that his firm, Catalyst Group, conducted in 2009.  The Kindle 2, which has been replaced by newer models such as the Kindle 3G since the time of this study (although the interface hasn’t evolved much,) was considered better off usability-wise than some of it’s competitors like the Sony eReader.  But it still had loads of usability issues, mostly as a result of a lot of peculiar and specific (to them) navigation conventions.   For instance, reflowable eBooks don’t have page numbers, they have “locations,” an abstraction which makes little sense to most readers and presents the rather significant problem of orientation within the linear experience of a book.  The hard keys on the Kindle (necessary on e-Ink displays unless a separate touch-screen panel is added, which is the approach taken by the original Nook.  Note the color Nook uses an LCD display, not an electrophoretic one) require a significant amount of getting used to, such as the large, redundant “next page” buttons that appear on both the left and the right side of the device (versus having the left-hand one devoted to “previous page” and the right-hand one devoted to “next page” which most users in the Catalyst study expected.)  Their are other peculiarities, such as trying to find the “text-to-speech” feature of the Kindle behind the text-resizer button and not in the main menu, which is entirely devoted to shopping.  The software versions of the Kindle reader, like the iPhone app, have a few issues of their own.  There is no back button, despite the fact that there are multiple internal linking conventions, such as end-notes, that can cause a reader to jump out of their current position.

What makes the Kindle easy to use, of course, is the ease of acquiring content.  Similar to how iTunes cracked the digital music nut, the Kindle team invested most of their energy in having a wide range of titles with unbelievable ease of purchasing and transferring content to the device.   But the real underlying issue affecting eBook user experience has far more to do with how the content itself is packaged, reflowed, and displayed – not any device conventions.  Expect to see real changes in the next few years as eBook producers develop their own design vocabulary and UI conventions.  One thing is for sure: electronic reading is here to stay.