Product design
Add/remove major features ● Amazon Kindle
Two weeks into my role as Senior Director of Kindle UX Design, I was told that the third-generation Kindle form factor was not going to have a hardware keyboard. It would also have only two rather than three function buttons. One of the buttons would display the new onscreen keyboard my team was to design, the other would open the Kindle Home screen. The Back button would be eliminated.
My given design directive: minimize the impact of the hardware modifications and the introduction of an onscreen keyboard to the existing Kindle UX. My gut said that the overall UX would be much more complicated to navigate without a dedicated Back button. And an onscreen keyboard design would take far longer to design than the desired, “week or so.”
Bringing back the Back button
Amazon is data-driven. My team and I documented how many steps it would take to complete standard Kindle use cases with and without a Back button. For example, returning to the Kindle store Home page from a genre page (e.g. science fiction) required only two clicks with a Back button. Without a Back button it would take six clicks.
The data were overwhelming —the Industrial Design (ID) team reluctantly agreed to add back the Back button. Another button (Menu) was added to create a symmetrical layout.
Onscreen keyboard
The PM and Dev teams had assumed that the design of an onscreen keyboard would be pretty straightforward—press the dedicated Keyboard button, enter your text, then close the keyboard. My team and I quickly demonstrated that the keyboard could not have a fixed location—it would have to appear above or below the field the user was editing to allow the user to catch mistakes as they typed.
Detailed keyboard design and user testing took place in parallel with discussions about the number of function buttons and where the keyboard would appear onscreen.
