Design a product to improve reading habits.

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Design a product to improve reading habits.

Asked at Google over a year ago

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ajayg · Answer 1 · 2021-02-15T23:02:16+0000

Clarifying Qs:

Since asked at Google interview,

Is this a product within Google apps OR a Physical Device? - Yes, Lets go with an App first
Any specific market this is for - lets go with US first
Is it for any specific user groups - No
Is it on both Mobile ( phone, Tablet) and Desktop - Lets go with Mobile first: Phone and Tablet
How different will this be from any competitor products like Kindle, or any other e-Reader: Leave it up to you!

Goals: Is this a brand new application? Or enhancing any existing product in Google? - Brand new. If its new product, we will first focus on getting customers onboarded with the app and adopting to using this regularly and thereby also improving engagement with the app

User groups:

Parents with kids who are struggling with reading habits
Young professions hard pressed for time to read
Elderly/Retired folks who love to read
Business Like Libraries can leverage this app to promote reading habits

I will choose the Parent with Kids in the age group of 5-12 who are spending more time at home with remote learning and hence access to books could be limited. Solving for this group will also help Parents to keep their kids occupied in a productive way with less distractions.

Lets go with a Persona of Emma who is a Parent with 2 kids - One daughter Kate who is 6 years and Son John who is 10 years. Emma is a working mom and needs help to organise her kids time effectively and needs help with improving her kid’s reading habits. Emma has just recently come to know of this app and has downloaded it.

User Journey	Pain Points
Emma logs into the app
Emma sets up accounts for each kid an creates their profile	Emma wants to ensure the privacy of her kids’ profiles
Emma browses book collections - filters by age, genre, author, keywords, etc	Emma is confused with the selections and needs help to narrow down her choices
Emma can download the book sample - some books are free but some are paid	Emma needs to be sure if kids will liek the book prior to purchase/downlaods
	Emma needs recommendations as she cannot decide which ones to downlaod
Emma might purchase some books as needed	Emma needs to be sure that her kids are not misusing the stored payment info
Emma needs to track how her kids are progressing in their reading journey	Emma is concerned her kids are not progressing well in reading.
	Emma is busy at times to read to her 6 year old she needs a reading budding or other help
	she finds her older kid keeps asking her help with some sentences/words to understand the book better

I will go with the following pain points:

Emma needs help with book selections and recommendations
Emma needs help tracking her kid’s reading habits/progress.
Emma is busy at times to read to her 6 year old she needs a reading budding or other help

As I feel these areas are bigger areas with lots of opportunities to solve for

Priority	Solution Idea	Value/IMpact	Effort
#1. Prioritize b, and c for MVP.	BookRecommendations Solutions: As a parent Emma, can connect within the app with other parents and help her kids get connected to other kids by age groups to get recommendations There can be an In-App search Bot that can help narrow down the choices with right set of branching questions Other readers can leave feedback/suggestions/ratings on the books to help Emma and her kids	High	High
#2	Tracking Progress with reading: App can send notifications to Emma on each kid’s progress from where they last left off reading. Once a kid has read the ‘sample’ book, app can prompt Emma if she wants to download the entire book and purchase as needed.	High	Medium
#3	Helping kids read: Emma’s younger kid struggles from lack of focus and hence having an “animated” voice read aloud to her kid will motivate her and engage her better If her kid gets stuck on any word, have built in dictionary word help	High	High

Metrics:

Primary Metric:

Number of App Downloads D/M/W

Number of User Profiles created within the app - D/W/M active users

Average time spent

Secondary Metric

Number of books downloaded W/M/D per user

Number of books purchased W/M/D per user

Number of reviews/ratings left by a user

Number of users who downloaded app but did not sign in

Number of Sign in , by age group, by demographics W/M/D

Number of users who read only a Sample of book but did not purchase.

Summary: I started with asking clarifying questions, identifying Goals, and user personas. Picked one user persona to focus on their Journey/Pain points. Identified Solutions for the prioritised pain points, identified what to solve for in terms of priority and them came up with Metrics.

Satish Nandi · Answer 2 · 2021-03-07T20:05:05+0000

The application is to improve individuals' reading habits by improving through attention/focus and interest, reducing the chance of users abandoning the reading books altogether.
Let's start with some clarification questions on the scope of the application.
1. Is this meant for beginners, novice, intermediate or advanced readers.
2. What market is this for Global, US, Europe, or Asia.
3. Who are we targeting for improvements, Native language or second language?
4. Platforms: Mobile, Desktop. (Completely offline native or Server/client model with internet connection all the time).
5. Standalone offering or partnership with kindle, google books, etc., without the need for custom hardware.

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Next :

Either I am making up; the market & other clarifications or assume I was nudged by the interviewer towards the following.
- Ideally, for a full range of readers, Beginners to Advanced, but you are free to choose.
- Let's stay focused on the US market with native English speakers.
- Stay with Mobile with reasonable screen size with color display with always internet connection and suitable computing power with the front looking camera on opening available market devices.
- Partnership... knock yourself off; sorry, he meant it's my choice.

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Among all the user groups, the beginners are the ones who need the most help. So I am going to focus and address the beginner group. It is going to have a visible impact compared to other user groups.

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Let's walk through the user journey first, list the needs and call out the pain points.
Step 1: Users are looking to develop a good reading habit but fail to cultivate it.
Step2: Users browser through different Genres and select a particular one.
Step3: Given the genre, they continue with book selection by ratings, categories, size of the book, etc.
Step 4/5: Selects a book and starts reading.
Step 6: Outcomes :
        # Might not find it exciting and fail to stay focused
        #Some give up
        #Some switch books.
Step 7: A portion finish
Step 8: Certain audiences continue through Step1 or 3 again... a portion failed to develop the reading habits and quit. The purpose of the product/app is to encourage reading through enablement.

The pain point of this user group :

# (1)Don't know where to start
#(2)Unable to choose the right book for their skills/interest and another nail in the coffin.
#(3)Unable to stay focused through reading. Like a good portion of the audience
#(4)Staying Focused but run into difficulties, i.e., vocabulary.
# (5) Making a good progression for their skills & improvements without taking up too complex tasks is only to be discouraged.

Needs: Guidance for 1, 2, and 5. Need tools to develop focus (4) and some help with (4)

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Let's prioritize the pain points/needs we should address. The criteria are going to be the impact, effort/cost of implementing, and skipping through items where help can or is available

1,2 and 5, the guidance will be a low priority. Based on the fact we are addressing beginner user groups, they tend to be school kids. There is a lot of help available from teachers to select a genre, books, and even appropriate progression guidance.

So I will be prioritizing the (4) Helping Staying focused and enabling ways to deal with vocabulary issues.

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Solutions

	Staying focused	Impact	Effort
1	Background music for focusing	Med	Low
2	Font and Zoom of text for appropriate reading	Med	Low
3	Enable programatic breaks to regain focus & interest	Med	Low/Med
4	Analyse distractions with Eye movement detection from the front camera & guide accordingly	High	High


	Vocablury support
5	Enable inline option i.e press on the word to provide meaning/synonyms etc.	High	Low

I will be using a combination of Impact and effort to priortise the solutions.

So line items 1, 2 & 5.

jcmacintosh · Answer 3 · 2021-02-06T06:20:27+0000

Clarifying questions
1. What is meant by improve reading habits
  1. are we asking more people to read
  2. are we asking people who are reading already to read more
  3. are we asking people to read quality content - assume this
2. Are we talking about an App / Extension
3. Are we talking about Mobile / Desktop
Goals for the Product
1. Retention, Engagement, Acquisition,
  1. Assume - Engagement
User Groups
1. Children age 8-15
2. Professionals who read casually between breaks, while going to office, before going to bed
3. Housewifes
4. Teachers - always looking for the best content
5. Parents of children looking to inculcate healthy reading habits in children
Lets focus on Parents of Children (8-15) looking to inculcate healthy reading habits.
Few Problems associated with this persona
1. Unable to find the right content for children to stay engaged
2. Are afraid of too much screen time for the children
3. Want to ensure children are reading that helps them grow and learn
4. Look for reading material that ensures continuity with what kids are studying at school
5. unable to find reading material that is not intimidating for kids to read
6. need reading material tailored to their kids interest.
7. Important to have the reading material be Fun
8. Important to have a view of what their kids are reading, like reading
Prioritization of use cases 1, 2, 7, 6, 8, 4, 5, 3
1. I would like to focus on the parent / child adoption of this new product by introducing the experience first before curating the content, which is why use cases 1,2,7,6,8 are MVP1.
2. This will enable engagement of the users with the product and provide an early view into adoption.
At this point I would like to list the features of the product
1. The premise of this product is that the reading still happens offline, on books , magazines, while the product aids and enables the child and parents to better provide a view into what the child is reading
  1. Smart white board - This can be something that the child can hang in his room, it can provide
    1. a view of the books recommended.
    2. It will have an ability for the child to choose his favorite characters.
    3. it will have an ability for the child to scribble as well.
    4. ability for the child to click and select the books read
    5. ability for child to enter into a gamezone for the books read
    6. ability for child to look at his top scores
  2. Companion App - Can be installed on iOS / Android. Users will need to
    1. sign in,
    2. setup a profile for the child,
    3. provide goals for reading, - can choose fiction, non fiction
    4. have an ability to choose what the child's current interests are. e.g. a parent can choose age of child 8, current interests wild animals or Disney characters
    5. have a recommendation page which has books tailored to the age range
    6. Ability to create lists for different levels of reading
    7. Ability to order books
    8. Ability to view reading progress
  3. Book assortment
    1. will include books which have a wide variety of meta data i.e. age, interest, characters, recommended by, reviews
    2. Will include a set of fun questions visual, that can be presented to the kids

Prioritization of solutions

Sl noFeaturerelative sizeuser impact

1	Smartboard - book view	S	L
2	Smartboard - book selection	M	M
3	Smartboard - character selection	M	L
4	Smartboard - Gamezone	L	L
5	Smartboard - Gamescores and History	M	M
6	Smartboard - scribblezone	S	L
7	Companion App - User Authentication	S	S
8	Companion App - User Profile	S	M
9	Companion App - Reading Goals	S	M
10	Companion App - Interest selection	S	M
11	Companion App - Recommendation	M	L
12	Companion App - Lists	M	S
13	Companion App - Reading Progress (Gamezone view)	M	L
14	Companion App - Order	L	L
15	Book Assortment - tags	S	S
16	Book Assortment - Fun Quiz	M	L

I would like to proceed with features 1,3,4,6,7,8,11,13,16 initially

The idea is to have the users first find this experience enjoyable. Introducing gaming in this process will make it fun for the child and a view into the game score will provide a view of the childs progress to the parents, especially since the games will be based on the books that the child has read.

Summary - In order to improve reading habits, I would like to focus on Parents of children who are new to reading, I am looking to increase engagement with a view to provide parents a progress of what the child is reading. My Product will be a combination of a smart board and a combo App. The child will engage with the smart board to choose, play after having read books offline, and the parents can gauge the childs progress by viewing on the companion app. Its important to have the experience be fun, introducing a reward / gaming experience for the child makes it enjoyable.

I would love to hear some feedback on this product design.