Every point along the customer journey from research to purchase is important. There is one place, though, where the customer is called upon to make a choice of exceptional consequence. That special spot is your product detail page. It’s there that the prospect will determine whether to purchase your product or keep looking.

My Role: As a UX / UI designer, I was part of an extremely talented product design team and worked closely with a group of professionals that ranged from product managers, product marketing, and engineering teams.

My Design Process

I followed the standard design process Audible had created as a best practice to make sure that my design decisions were supported by user research and feedback.

Meet Zoe, a 40-year-old Sr. Fashion Buyer for a respectable fashion label and lives in Millburn, NJ with two adorable kids and a hubby. She is highly habituated to Audible and uses the app multiple times per day through various devices. Below illustrates Zoe's behaviors, needs and goals, along with a "day in the life" in more detail.

How We got to Zoe

To start off, we created a provisional persona of a habituated Audible user based on online research and metrics. This was something that we came back to throughout the project to guide our design decisions and priorities. Below are sketches and notes we took during a brainstorm.

Habituated users do not feel that the current Product Detail Page is inspiring or engaging enough to make a decision on a piece of content.  Our users feel as though Audible doesn't know enough about them to give content that resonates and are relevant.  They have a precious credit every month and want to make sure that the next listen is worth the $14.95.  They also feel as though the 5-minute sample and a summary is enough for me to make a confident decision.

We need to provide compelling elements within the Product Detail Page that help guide our users to make the right decision for their next listen.  Designing with empathy is essential. If we know more about our users (lifestyle, daily activities, and taste) we will give our users a more personalized experience.  We will then:

• Increase Confidence: Our users will feel as though they can make the best choice for their next listen

• Increase Trust: Users will have trust in Audible to provide them with content they will want to listen to

• Increase Satisfaction: The happier our users are, the longer they will stay (increasing retention)

We reviewed the recordings of previous user studies and tests and jotted down each user’s pain point onto a Post-It. From there we focused on features we believed would truly speak to and alleviate the pain.

Based on the ask of our users, we needed to define the PDP hierarchy. As you see below we wanted to map out the type of content that will be displayed as the user scrolls down the PDP page.  

As we progressed on the PDP hierarchy we granulized the type of content we wanted to present into zones. This zoning map shows how we broke down the PDP based on the listening state the user was in. Zone 1 allows the user to understand the content is about. Zone 2 allows the user to either purchase the book or dive right back in. Zone 3 allows for the community to speak to the user to help reinforce the purchasing decision. Zone 4 is more of a deeper dive into the content being presented and Zone 5 allows the user to find other related content.

Hierarchy Breakdown

Let's get more granular with these features and modules. As we moved forward, we wanted to specify what features would truly bring value to our users. So we asked ourselves questions that helped define those features.

The Web team took my concepts as inspiration and made it a reality. The team designed and developed three distinct approaches to the PDP customer experience each with its own user interface, personality, custom art and humanized editorial voice. They named these three approaches by their core sensibilities - Cinematic Immersion, Editorial Craft and Big Data. They then applied each of these distinct templates to two different audiobooks - Born a Crime and The Handmaidens Tale. They sought to demonstrate that these three PDP approaches can elevate two very different types of audiobook. Each of these six PDPs (3 templates X 2 audiobooks) were then further customized to create versions optimized for desktop and another tailored to mobile. The net result is we now have 12 distinct PDP experiences we are releasing into the market as part of this experiment.

In launching these PDP 2.0 experiments we are eager to learn how they impact our business and increase our customers satisfaction. We will learn which individual aspects of each page connect most deeply with our customers. To achieve this, we will quantitatively measure our business KPI’s and customer engagement and in parallel glean qualitative insights directly from our customers. We are looking forward to sharing our learnings with you all as they are generated and synthesized.