Kindred: Designing a Social Audiobook Experience

Designing an audiobook app that helps people stay engaged while listening and connect with friends through a shared reading experience.

Two smartphones displaying e-book and social media apps against a light green background.

Overview

As someone who loves audiobooks, I’ve noticed they often become background noise rather than something you fully engage with. I also enjoy discussing books with others and sharing what resonates. That insight inspired Kindred, my graphic design senior capstone project, completed over four months and exhibited at the senior capstone show. Through user research, competitive analysis, surveys, and interviews, I designed an audiobook app that helps listeners reflect on what they hear and easily share meaningful quotes with friends.

User Research, Prototyping, Branding

Academic Project

Timeline

Details

Tools

Role

Academic Project

4 Months, Spring 2026

The Problem

In today's distraction-filled world, audiobook listeners want to read more and share their experiences, but often struggle to stay focused and remember what they've heard.

Discover

User Interviews

After defining my problem statement, I interviewed three audiobook listeners to validate my assumptions and better understand their listening habits, frustrations, and motivations. My research focused on focus, retention, bookmarking, and social connection.

The interviews revealed three key insights:

Saving audiobook moments should be effortless

“I clip it. It's very arduous. With Audible there's so many steps.”

Listeners want more ways to connect through books

“I never have meaningful discussions about it.”

Shared reading motivates people to finish books

"I feel obligated to finish it so that I can be there for the other person."

Competitive Analysis

For the next step of this research, I wanted to look at the current space of apps and tools used for audiobooks and social reading, where people connect over books. This included both direct audiobook platforms and indirect competitors focused on book tracking and community discussion. The goal was to understand how existing products support listening, retention, and social connection, and where there might still be gaps in the experience.

Overall, most platforms focus on either listening to content (Audible, Libby, Everand) or social connection around books (Fable, Goodreads), but not both. This creates an opportunity for an app that blends seamless audiobook listening with simple, low-friction ways to reflect and connect with others while reading.

Define

User Persona

I summarized the most glaring user motivations, goals, and frustrations into a single persona to guide my design.

Develop

User Flow

I mapped out how users achieve a core goal: sharing a quote while listening. I focused on a decision point allowing users to choose whether to open a chat or return to their book. Making community engagement optional invites spontaneous connection without disrupting the core listening flow.

Flowchart diagram illustrating a process starting with 'Start', proceeding through steps such as 'Audiobook Player', 'Tap Play', 'Tap Quote', and 'Quote Page', with conditional branches for 'Open Chat?' leading to either 'Return to Audiobook' or 'Open Chat', and ending at 'End'.

Telling the Story Through Motion

To help communicate the concept beyond static screens, I created a promotional video that introduced the problem Kindred was designed to solve and demonstrated how the product could fit into a parent's everyday life.

The video combined motion, typography, imagery, and product screens to create a short narrative around the Kindred experience.

The Capstone Presentation

The presentation board was designed to communicate the project at a glance while giving viewers enough context to understand the problem, process, and final product.

I approached the board as an extension of the Kindred brand rather than simply a display of project documentation. I carefully considered hierarchy, spacing, imagery, typography, and how the viewer would move through the information from beginning to end.