Kindle: A User Experience Case Study

Amazon Kindle Experience is Excellent

Impressed. My experience thus far with the Kindle 2 book reader from Amazon has been nothing short of excellent. Amazon seems to have really gotten the Kindle right. The all-encompassing user experience from the time you are making the purchase decision, to the time that you start reading books on the device - is world class.

I placed my overnight shipping order (I get $3.99 overnight shipping with my Prime membership) around 5pm on a Monday. In regular Amazon fashion, the package was shipped within hours. Not just "shipping information transmitted to shipper" or anything like that (some of you know what I'm talking about here, I'm sure...), but literally "in transit". Also known as...in the back of a UPS truck somewhere.

A couple hours after placing my order, I went on the Amazon website to start shopping for my first book. I of course got side-tracked looking at what magazines and blogs could be purchased for the Kindle as well. Though I have yet to try out a blog, newspaper or magazine - it's an enticing and interesting proposition. Nevertheless, I ultimately was looking for a book to purchase, so I ended up searching through some of the software development titles that were available.

I spend a good portion of my reading time reading professional reference books on various software development topics depending on what projects or interests I am currently pursuing. As I was shopping these titles, I realized that almost all of theme have a button that says "Send Sample Now" where you can get a sampling of the book in order to make a decision to buy it or not. I was signed into my Amazon account and behold, it says "Delivery to: Matt's 2nd Kindle".  I guess it was called my "2nd Kindle" because I had already installed (but never used) the Kindle PC software. So I picked out about 5 or 6 books that I wanted to preview and had them all sent to the kindle, that remember, was still likely in a warehouse or in the back of a delivery truck somewhere.

When I received the package the next day, I immediately opened it, plugged in the power cord (though it had a pretty healthy charge), read the obligatory "welcome to Kindle" orientation stuff that was immediately available, then looked at my "Home". This is where all of your resources are listed out, including the books you have chosen to preview. My Kindle had the books from surfing on the Kindle store the night before, available right then when it was first turned on. Magic? Yes - in the form of a wireless connection to the Amazon servers. It was a seamless experience from the order, to the shopping, to the package arriving, to firing it up for the first time. Bravo Amazon.

Kindle Solves Some Old Problems

I've always liked standard print books as reference material to learn from, however, many times they are quite bulky. To make matters worse, the way I read technical texts is not really always in a front-to-back manner. I'll either find the exact information I'm seeking at that moment, or I'll read in a linear fashion front-to-back, but stopping here and there to pursue other things. This means there is an eternal bookmark at some point throughout several books at any given time. With little kids in the house, bookmarks tend to not be the most reliable method for holding your spot so you can resume reading when you are ready. I re-read entire chapters and felt like I was having deja-vu!

The Kindle solves these dilemmas - but it also introduces a few of it's own issues which I'll discuss later. It's tiny, in a good way. I would never carry more than one computer book around with me at any given time, and this can let me carry a library of these books! As for the bookmark issue? Bookmarking Kindle pages is pretty easy once you know what you're doing. It also has notation and highlighting functionality if you need to mark various spots of the text with particular notes that you want to be able to reference. No more worries that your bookmarks will be lost and you now have indexed notations to refer back to. Pretty powerful.

Electrophoretic Display

So far, I've dumped big fat books and removed the issue of having bookmarks and notes lost as the book shuffles its way around the house. These are good features, but what really makes the Kindle impressive I think, is the nice little 6" display. The "electronic paper" and "electronic ink, as they call it, are made by using an "electrophoretic display". The electrophoretic display forms the images on the screen by arranging pigment particles via an applied electric field. It's like a really-cool etch-a-sketch. So sharp. So clean.

I use really good monitors when I'm working on the computer - and yes, they look pretty good, but they don't even compare to the clarity of the Kindle display. It looks great and is very easy on the eyes while reading, though the background gray could stand to be a bit lighter. Overall however, the screen gets an "A". I haven't tried it in bright sunlight yet, but it does seem to be pretty glare resistant. Since the display is a big part to what is going to make your reading experience more enjoyable, so it's a really good thing the display looks so nice.

Go Toward the Light...

There is no built in light, and just as with a paper book, if you don't have a light on, you won't be able to read your Kindle either. I'm surprised the engineers didn't figure out some sort of pop-up LED light bar or something. There are of course the standard clip-on book lamps that are available in a large variety of shapes and sizes and should work just fine for the purpose of reading illumination. It's just a sorta bulky thing to have to carry with such a succinctly designed device.

Begin Reading Experience

When a book comes up on the screen for the first time, it seems to always be opened to the front of the book. This varied slightly depending on the format of the book, but in general it took me to the "About the Authors" part which is just a couple pages away from the actual page 1, chapter 1 location where the meat of most books start. This is pretty convenient, and it's really easy to get back to the index from anywhere in the book, so if you don't want to start at the beginning (assuming this is your first time opening this book).

Text Resize Feature is Good

One of the features I played with early-on was the text resize feature. This will effectively enlarge the size of the text you are reading as well as reduce the number of words that fall on each "page". Though the default size seemed fine, I was happy with it enlarged to one size bigger. This made the text even more readable and reduced the time it took to move through each page. I really like the way the Kindle does it's re-pagination for instances like this. It's very clean and transparent to the user.

Diagrams Can be Challenging for the Kindle

Most of the tech books I read have numerous diagrams and screen shots in them, these can be challenging to read on the Kindle 2. Even though you can "zoom" an image, in which case it will reprint it on the screen, by itself, in a horizontal manner...it really doesn't make many of the technical diagrams very readable without straining. I did notice that a few of the tech books I looked at when shopping stated that they were designed specifically for the larger Kindle DX. This could be part of the reason why, though I think with some better zooming controls, the diagrams in these situations could be a bit more useful. Luckily, code listings were handled more like the regular text and were very legible. Overall, I'd give the zooming capabilities (at least as I discovered) a "C+". These could be improved to allow for closer zooming if necessary. Perhaps it's there and I just didn't figure it out - though I tried.

Summary

Good purchase experience, seamless integration with Amazon.com's Kindle store, fabulous display, incredible wireless connectivity for free...overall the Kindle is an excellent device. Amazon is obviously putting a lot of effort into the overall customer experience with this product, and it shows. I think they've implemented the entire process in a beautifully streamlined manner. Of course, the overall user experience wouldn't matter if the device arrived and was terrible. But it's not, plain and simple. It's great thus far! I'll give you an update after I'm through a handful of books and have been using it for a while, but for now, that's all.