Amazon Kindle

Author pages for mobile web.

How might we make author pages useful to mobile users?

Author pages on Amazon are the central location for all content related to a single author, including their bio, books, and social media presence. At the time of my summer internship, they existed on desktop, but not on mobile browsers. Instead, a search for an author's name on the mobile site would turn up only a list of books written by that author. On desktop, this is what author pages looked like at the time:

For my internship, I was tasked with the project of designing author pages specifically for mobile web. But I didn't want simply to re-layout the elements of the desktop page to fit a phone screen. I knew I needed to figure out how (and in what particular contexts) readers were using their mobile devices to search for book and author information, and to design an experience fitted specifically to mobile users' needs. Before I began, I had a few big questions.

Q: How do readers discover and interact with authors?

Q: How and why do readers currently use Amazon's author pages?

Q: How might they use them on mobile?

To begin to answer these questions, I designed a qualitative research study in which I interviewed self-identified avid readers in detail about their approach to book discovery and their attitudes towards authors. In synthesizing the data from these interviews, I found patterns in the way readers organized their reading with respect to their favorite authors.

I began to think about readers as existing on a spectrum of author-centricity. Highly author-centric readers followed their favorite authors on Twitter and kept up with their personal lives. The least author-centric readers couldn’t remember who wrote the last book they read. Most of my interviewees were somewhere in the middle: they didn’t think about authors as people, so much, as they used them as a framework to organize and direct their reading.

I compiled my findings in a report that included six specific insights about authors, readers, and the mobile experience, along with actionable recommendations to the company at large for how to use each of these insights in future design work. (I also gave a live presentation of this information to designers from the larger Kindle group, so that my findings could be used beyond my immediate team.)

For author pages on mobile, I knew now that I should be designing primarily for readers in the middle of the author-centricity spectrum, focusing on the author page as a gateway to book discovery. The research also posed design challenges: for example, how to organize a prolific author’s books when a reader was likely only to be interested in one of the author’s genres?

From these findings, I iterated on interactive prototypes (created with Azure) and tested them with real users. At the end of my internship, I delivered redlines to the engineering team for an MVP version of author pages on mobile, in which I focused on reusing existing site components to achieve a high level of book-discovery value. I also created mockups for a future-facing, full-featured version, designed for exploration and serendipity in the book-buying process.

While I am unable to show all of the described artifacts on this site, I am happy to provide a complete walkthrough of the process and results of this project in person.