Epic! Product
Making new digital reading experiences, loved and enjoyed by kids of all ages
EXPERTISE
Product Design
TEAM SIZE
5
PROJECT DURATION
6 months
OUTPUT
2 updates
ACHIEVEMENT
Goal
With Epic! being looked at as the Netflix for books, it has forever been a massive hit with young readers. And with that comes expectations to constantly innovate and define new reading experiences like nothing out there. While innovation is definitely the driving factor, our expectation was to make informed product decisions to add new features and updates that would improve overall metrics and interaction with the app.
Process
Depending on the goal behind the feature addition and the conducted user research, two new experiences were added with initial explorations on a third potential long-term feature that intended to leverage AI. Since new reading formats like motion comics were an instant hit, we realized that there was a need to make it an interactive experience - enter cinematic pages. The feature enables users to switch between a simple Kindle-like experience with an additional read-to-me feature and an animated version of the page, making for a more immersive and engaging time on the app. Since this feature was heavy on the content creation front, we also had to establish pipelines that would take advantage of existing animations from the motion comics. The other feature was targeted at increasing the time spent on reading books, and adding more entry points to popular book series for the children. This required us to create interactive quizzes, cards, and other byte-sized content nodes that acted as "snacks" before the main "meal" of reading. Almost 800 engaging snacks were developed in under 6 months, with a plan set to keep creating at a 100 snacks per month rate. This number was defined based on the interactions we defined as enough to drive traffic to books, while at the same time avoiding repetition. Only preliminary work went into the AI feature with respect to the rationale behind it, and was at its early stage of research before being shelved. The idea was to develop a mechanism via which children could create storybooks of their own, with content and art, using the power of AI.
Result
Features like cinematic pages and snacks were successfully added to the overall platform experience, that saw massive adoption and spikes in the numbers. Additionally, a full-fledged workflow that required writers, animators, and artists was set up to handle creation of content for these features.