Paul Gates

Nook

A next generation reading experience

Nook

Project Overview

  • Role and Responsibilities

    Over the course of numerous iterative cycles, I guided a UX team through discovery and visioning, served as an Agile coach for our client, and personally designed a portion of the experience.

  • Challenge

    Create a next-generation e-reader with the ability to attract new types of readers, grow the business, and reinvent the NOOK brand.

  • Solution

    A new reading platform that tracks users’ daily content consumption habits and provides a curated experience based on their interests.

Process

  • Gathering Requirements

    I worked with NOOK product owners and key stakeholders to understand their goals: NOOK wanted to grow their revenue 200% over the next 1-2 years. We also defined success metrics and how the product might change to accommodate new user behaviors.

  • New Personas & User Research

    NOOK had existing research on their core users, but they didn’t have any data on the customers they were looking to acquire. Knowing that they had already saturated their current market but wanted to grow their user base by 200%, I helped the client team discover that they could only achieve their goal by targeting a younger customer.


    My team worked with NOOK to create a new set of realistic personas based on the behaviors of younger users.

  • Vision Workshops

    Vision Workshops

    My team and I facilitated a client workshop to develop a joint vision for the future of the NOOK product. We created a customer journey that the product and design teams used for persona-based experience mapping.


    While playing the part of three personas, the team plotted all of the touchpoints, emotions, and pain points that users might encounter in the next experience.

  • Using the User Journey to Drive Decisions

    Based on our workshop outputs, the team synthesized patterns in our three personas’ user journeys into a single master journey map. All NOOK groups used this journey map to maintain a unified vision and as a tool for validating product decisions.

  • Product Concepts

    Concept Development && Testing

    My team conducted a series of design studios to create concepts for each touchpoint of the NOOK experience, drawing upon the goals and pain points from our customer journey map. We then worked with the NOOK research team to test our concepts and determine which were likely to provide the most value.

  • Feature Prioritization

    After validating the most promising design concepts, we worked with our stakeholders to prioritize our feature ideas. The team then split up into smaller working groups to continue developing the new experience.