Reading experience redesign
A great reading experience is the heart of Yuna.
It's the moment where personalization, storytelling, and technology come together to create something magical for kids and families.
The problem
Through user interviews and feedback, we discovered that while people loved Yuna's personalized stories, the reading experience itself wasn't engaging or interactive enough for children.
We saw a high rate of abandoned books before completion. People weren't coming back for more readings as we expected.
OLD reading experience
The goal 🎯
To increase engagement and retention.
Success metrics:
Increase retention (D1, D3, D7, D14)
Increase % of books read
Increase average time per session
Grow DAU and MAU
The hypothesis was simple: if we create an immersive, interactive, and delightful reading experience, users would want to read more — and keep coming back.
Initiatives
Redesigning the experience considering that reading a new book is an important daily ritual for families. A special moment where parents and kids get to sit down and bond over a personalized story together.
Redesigning controllers for a simple immersive experience.
Creating book navigation controllers that feel seamless and easy.
Introducing typography options for different needs.
Kids who are learning to read can only identify certain types of typography. Whereas adults and literate children can read more and smaller text on a screen.Introducing better images — they help tell the story and keep kids engaged.
Introducing voice-over for those who prefer to also listen along.
Including animated images for pre-literate children — keeping them engaged while adults tell the story.
Making reading progress more prominent.
Animation when opening a book to reduce perception of time while personalized book is being generated.
Concerns
While we wanted to create an experience people would enjoy coming back to on a daily basis, one of our principles was to design a healthy experience. That means NO use of infinite scroll patterns or hyper-stimulating images and sounds.
The habit of reading with Yuna was designed to be experienced in small doses.
Just a little, every day.
Usability test
With our prototype in hands we ran a series of usability tests with existing users to understand how they perceived and experienced the reading changes.
Results
The A/B tests showed that users who went through the NEW experience finished more books and were more likely to come back. They also asked for more content and wanted longer stories.
However, we deactivated animated images after learning that users who saw animations during the story were actually less likely to finish books or coming back.