Yes, Audio Book UX Design is a Thing

Part one on Digital Publishing and UX

The Introduction.

User experience is closely tied to the development of web and mobile apps. This is for good reason, the economic incentives are great if you nail the user needs on the head.

One thing to consider however is the ever-widening gap between software tools and rich media experiences that can be a reality for the entertainment and education industries.

How you listen to an audiobook is an experience. You might not even notice what kind of experience it is because it is more of a passive medium, but the two reasons an audiobook is good is the production value and the meta-data.

Production value I’m not going to cover here, but the meta-data? That’s a part of the experience we can control as designers.

Metadata might seem trivial, but think about Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci, the book is a digitalization of the two disks, and the art is too small to read, if you get lost, how do you know where to find your place?

See? Meta-data does matter! Especially if you’re writing a paper about the history of Leonardo for class and you want to use the audiobook as a resource.

So in this document, I’m going to reorganize the young Winston Churchill biography “Hero of the Empire” by Candice Millard. I’m going to but intentional thought into the audiobook process, the kind of thought that is negligible in the audiobook industry standards.

The Project.

The Project. “But Caden!” Says the skeptical stakeholder, “audio is a passive experience! Nobody cares where they are, they just press play!”

Au contraire stereotypical stakeholder, assumptions aside, audiobooks have only recently reached their golden years, with services like Audible, podcasts and iBooks to stream the wisdom of the ages into you airpods. You don’t have airpods? Nonetheless, the principle still stands.

Recent research shows that publishers have produced a 33.9% increase in the number of audiobooks published since 2016! (Kozlo-wski 2017)* Heres another big deal, “HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House have all verified that ebook sales have declined by around 5% and the only way their digital unit has consistently seen a profit, is primarily due to audiobooks.” (Kozlowski 2017)*

Not only that, but contrary to popular belief, audiobooks are listened to the most at home the most with the car coming in at close second. With the rise of voice services like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, and the newly released Apple Homepod, the ability to control audiobooks has increased. The audiobook experience increases. Many of new cars don’t even have a CD player. With Carplay technology that enlarges the album artwork to rasterizing proportions if you are not careful.

“But Caden! Audiobook sales are through the roof! And most publishers just copying the CD cover art and digitizing the Cd’s, why the extra effort if money is already being made?”

Technology is changing, and the new ways you can listen to an audiobook are being invented every day, innovation waits for no one, especially for big publishing. By not doing anything, these big publishers are ripe for disruption. Allow me to present a few problems Audiobooks do not currently solve:

• What about textbooks? You know, the things that take up a majority of a students time in college? How can you navigate to different topics and review for a test while you do chores around the house or while working in that part-time warehouse job?

• What about non-fiction, skill-intensive book? Most of the ones I have can be so dry that they are impossible to listen to, or while driving you miss an opportunity to marinate on a principle. Here’s a screenshot of a very principally dense audiobook on audible. Ray Dalio’s Principles.

Chapter 150!? There is no way you can review items. Even with the bookmark feature, you wouldn’t be able to cover everything.

The problem with the layout on this audiobook is that it just tells you to buy the hard copy of references. Referring to the bookmark features, do you seriously think this helps people? If your driving, you shouldn’t take your eyes off the road, and if your doing the dishes, that important nugget is lost before you can dry your hands. How are you supposed to make it back to that one part when there are 150 nameless chapters?

I hope I made my point. The opportunities for audiobook publishing is wide and vast, and don’t say, “you can’t compete with Audible”, that is false. Look at what Spotify did to Apple in the music space, have a little faith!

The Approach.

Hero of the Empire is a biography that covers a 25-year-old Winston Churchill’s escape from a POW camp in South Africa during the Bohr War during the turn of the 19th century.

It is an interesting read, and the story is rather incredible, something that comes from an adventure fiction. As it explains the character of the future wartime Prime Minister of Great Britain it shows how Churchill was a product of the British Colonial Aristocracy — which awarded the gallant and well connected. Great Britain was a lot like America is now, with a feeling that they where the best country in the world, and that any skirmish in their colonies would be easy battles one. Which was not the case in the Bohr War, where Britain was hit with the harsh reality of the end of their peak.

So while Britain is getting a reality check, Churchill is this idealistic young aristocrat with a big chip on his shoulder. He is looking for a big adventure and a good war story to launch him into a seat in parliament. It is written in the third person, but the story is practically through the eyes of Churchill. So I wanted to approach this Audiobook as if it was a fictional adventure book.

The metadata needed to be structured as such. When you look at many young adult novels or even the universally acclaimed Harry Potter series, the chapter display is Chapter 1: (insert name of the chapter that refers to an occurrence in this part of the book).

Candice Millard did a great job to name her chapters this way. Separating them into parts.

So instead of reinventing the wheel, I would make sure the meta-data displayed this structure in the audio player. The big challenge was the how to enter in parts. You can only name a book by chapters in the meta-data fields.

A little-known fact about iTunes Audiobooks is that every chapter can have different artwork! So a workaround for this problem was this: I could use visual cues for each part of the book in the form of artwork and have the chapters be separated textually in the meta-data. The only downside is that Audible will not let you do this as of writing this brief. So all design decisions from this point will be to optimize to the Apple audiobook player.

The Nitty Gritty.

I opened a spreadsheet and got to work organizing and planning all how I would lay out the meta-data. I split all chapters into sections and laid out the author data based on the iTunes standards.

I then placed a tracking column where I can label wherein the raw audio files which track started a new chapter or section. This spreadsheet will come in handy when assembling the audiobook.

A couple notes: My description is so short because Apple truncates longer ones, I put “Narrated by” in the composer section because I wanted it to show that way in the audiobook player.

Finally, I placed an exclamation point at the end of the title because I wanted to create an adventure book feel to it. Like an old silent movie.

How The Sausage is Made.

With all the book planned out, I started building the book in Audiobook Builder and organized all the audio tracks into chapters, and I will worry about the part separation with the cover art.

Going through all the audio files I listened for any changes into new chapters. Once that was done, I moved onto designing the screens. Below is the album art. Stay tuned for the process of making it!

The Sketch.

I wanted to make something that was appropriate to the era but also doesn’t feel like historical non-fiction.

The thought occurred to me that Silent films where a medium at the time and would make a great way to show parts of Churchill’s adventure. Like an adventure film. So I naturally gravitated toward the silent film title and dialogue cards.

I sketched out a concept in Photoshop sketch and sent into Illustrator to make the title art and art for each part of the book.

The Cover Art.

Below is what was produced. Cover art for every section. I didn’t make any for the Intro and Prologue because it felt like it was excessive to have the cover page only on one track. I think it is better for the experience with the start of the book showing the cover art and then the section art when the narrative gets started.

The Epilogue was one of the longer tracks so it got its own section art for two reasons: one, it is there to indicate that the book is wrapping and up two, it is to long of a track to just lump in with part 5 of the book.

The Build.

With all chapters built, and cover art made, I dragged the cover and section art into their prospective chapters and exported the audiobooks to iTunes.

The next part was going through each track and making sure that all meta-data fields where correct and ready for testing.

The iPhone Test.

This is how it looks on the iPhone player. The meta-data presents itself well. One thing to note is that the title of each chapter scrolls across the page if the title is big which is a nice touch. You will notice that anything like release date, description and composer are not viable. Those only show in the store I’m afraid. They are just tiny details to sort and sell books.

On the bright side, all essential meta-data is visible and the cover art is readable! Make sure to make it 2400x2400 pixels to avoid pix-elation!

The iPad Test.

iTunes is preventing me from syncing my audiobook to my iPad, but it lets me sync to my phone.

It just shows all my audiobooks with the exception of Hero of the Empire! I don’t know why that is, but it might have to do with the audiobook not being on the iTunes store.

It shows me that it is locked in iTunes with a light gray text and I am not sure how to fix it. But by looking at how the player is formatted for the iPad, I can assume longer chapter titles will have no issue displaying here.

The Macbook Test.

The Macbook experience isn’t bad, but there is no meta-data on display when you open the solo window feature (which is just the cover art that you click on to show the controls). In the iTunes app, the top bar controls show the meta-data but it is super small and it scrunches up the album artwork.

So the experience on desktop depends on good album artwork storytelling to work because the meta-data plays a small role.

Take notes! This is important for Apple Tv and larger interfaces, the artwork is king for navigation!

The Conclusion.

iTunes and Amazon are limited when it comes to a good audiobook experience. Their players withhold meta-data and using album artwork to navigate on audible isn’t likely yet. Entrepreneurs, there might be an opportunity for an audiobook player that allows better navigation features!

You can see that the audiobook experience is optimized for mobile and is probably not meant for desktop listening. My guess is that the desktop and laptop experience is skipped altogether so mobile and voice experience can be made better.

Audiobooks are mobile, they allow you to read on the car or while running errands and doing chores. They enable multitasking. And that’s a key to the experience.

The cool thing to consider is that album artwork might be the savior for the large screen experience. If the book is robust, maybe you should have artwork for every chapter, allowing for visual wayfinding while you listen on your Apple Tv or Homepod.

The audiobook industry standards could use an improvement, as the use of audiobooks grows, the experience needs to evolve to meet the demand. Right now there are no affordances made for information-dense non-fiction books. You can get by with narrative books, but how can you solve the doing homework on the go problem?

That might be something to explore…

Since I wrote this, I realize that the Candice Millard text on the cover art is hard to read, if I would do it again, I’d switch the font something more legible.

Originally published at CadenD Studios.