Audiobook App Concept

This was a conceptual exercise to design an Audiobook app for mobile. While audiobooks are the fastest growing audio segments on mobile, users who listen to audiobooks are not able to enjoy the benefits of dog-earring pages, highlighting excerpts, and writing notes on their favorite parts. The prompt was to design an audiobook app with the ability to bring to the user even more utility than a book ever could.

Audiolab is a personal, interactive, and social audiobook app for the creative and discerning listener.

Make audiobooks fun, interactive, and social with Audiolab. Audiolab combines the convenience and flexibility of audiobooks with the interactive functionality of e-books, to give you a highly personal and engaging experience. Whether you’re listening on your way to work, cramming for your psychology exam, or preparing for your favorite book club, Audiolab has the tools you need to elevate your audiobook game.

What does the market look like?

More important than the market size is who listens to audiobooks and how they listen to them. Audiobooks are most popular with 30-49 year olds and college educated people. The overwhelming majority of users listen while commuting.

Precedent Research

I researched a range of apps from those with similar content and structure (Audible) to those with different content but structural similarities (Evernote).

Content and Site Map

After a quickly sketched mind map where I brainstormed potential features, I organized those into a content map and considered how the content would be structured within the app. On the right is an example site map showing how a returning user would navigate to a recently played audiobook, make markups, and share or save those markups.

Interaction Map

Still in the conceptual phase, the interaction map evolved along with the site map and content map above. I diagrammed how users would navigate through the app, where they would need to make decisions or be faced with options. This was valuable in streamlining the experience and eliminating dead ends.

Wireframes - Home Screen

Quick notebook sketches led to more detailed wireframes of the home page. These were the three options I settled on with varying degrees of personalization. The final design is a combination of v1 and v2.

Wireframes - Play Screens

Maybe the most important functionality of the app is how users play audiobooks and create markups. I knew I wanted to include aspects of e-book and note-taking app functionality. The wireframes below show how a user might create an audio clip and make notes to accompany the clip.

Wireframes - Markup and Group Screens

The markup and book club features are key differentiators of Audiolab. Reminiscent of note-taking apps, the markup feature gives users a highly customized experience. Users can create markups in various formats and personalize them with notes, tags, and attachments.

The book club feature introduces a social element to Audiolab that is absent from other Audiobook apps. Users can join book clubs organized around specific books, genres, or classes. Within those groups, members can share their markups and notes and communicate with one another. Markups within book clubs can be organized in user-generated folders.