My Role

Bookmate is not just a product but outstanding teamwork of people working at the company. I've been with Bookmate for 5 years. In this time, we've grown significantly as a team, company, and product.

In 2013, Bookmate was a small library of around 200K books, mostly in Russian, and 500K MAU. By the end of 2017, Bookmate has grown the user base to 9M registered users, with 250K paid subscribers, expanded to 19 markets, and added more than 1M books in 15 languages to the library.

I initially joined Bookmate as a UX and Graphic Designer, and have grown into Product Director. In this role, my focus was to grow the product, lead the product and design teams, build the product roadmap, plan and prioritize development resources, find growth opportunities together with data science and marketing teams, shape product values.

My key areas of responsibility

1. Product for readers

• Monetization, conversion optimization, growth.
• User engagement and retention. Product, marketing, and editorial initiatives.
• Discovery. Building and optimizing user journeys, core screens, building the internal books marketplace: book search, recommendations, algorithmic and editorial recommendations.
• Reading experience and text interaction: pleasurable reading process across mobile devices and desktop.

2. Product for publishers and authors, internal tools

• Publisher toolkit. Book stock management, reporting tools. Apart from stock management, the tools provide unique reading analytics about a publishers' book stock and create transparency about their earnings.
• Editorial toolset. Database management of books, audiobooks, comic books and podcasts, storefront management, editorial curation, content creation, management of search scenarios, metadata enrichment, the interconnection of content.
• Support tools. Troubleshooting automation, UGC moderation.

Product and Design Team

Creative Direction – Maxim Balabin
Designers – Gerasim Ambartcumian, Ekaterina Ereza
Product Design Lead, Product Lead – Alexander Petrovsky

Platforms

Bookmate has been featured multiple times in the App Store, Google Play, and Windows Phone Store top charts of multiple countries.

Case Studies

Largely, my role was to grow the product: in terms of business results and user experience. During the 5 years I've been with the company, we've gone through multiple iterations of this process. I'll share some of these below.

Case Study

Low Conversion into Trial Subscription

Task

Decrease the entry-level for new users, raise conversion into trial subscription purchase.

Solution

We have mapped the user journey and based on that, have added relevant touchpoints for product communication and trial subscription triggers. We have created a framework for testing product communication hypotheses and tools. These included pop-up triggers with best seller books, buttons, storefront banners.

Result

Conversion to trial subscription raised x2.

Case Study

Poor Quality and Quantity of Metadata

Task

Generate metadata through user activity

Solution

We have introduced "impressions" – quick reactions to books through a set of ready-to-use labels denoting emotions. The user may pick a one-click impression, and add their comment. Emotion labels are a more personal alternative to the traditional 5-star ranking model. Bookmate was one of the first products in the world to introduce this type of user experience.

Beyond creating metadata, the "impressions" feature has to lead the path to hitting multiple goals: engage users in book discussions, shape a more personal user space and reader experience, create a tighter emotional connection with the service.

Result

The number of user impressions has outnumbered the number of titles in the catalog. The metadata created through this feature has allowed mapping titles based on UGC input, which helped to significantly improve book recommendations. The introduction of "impressions" has also led to the rise in user engagement, and has surfaced the social layer of the service.

Case Study

Inconsistency of User Experience Across Multiple Platforms, Inefficiency of Design Solutions

Task

Make user experience universal, intuitive across all platforms, organic to the users of each platform. Make design decisions systematic, scalable, revert the design process to serve business needs.

Solution

We have created a scalable design system that works across all existing platforms, and have rolled it out across all platforms. While implementing the design system, we have updated the design process, have made it more business-focused and collaborative with other stakeholders.

Result

We have achieved the consistency of the product across all platforms, and have scaled that to marketing communication. This effort has shaped the identity of the product and brand.

Case Study

Scaling the product offering from ebooks to audio-books

Task

Launch a new market segment – audiobooks, in a short time frame, without compromising/cannibalizing the core product value.

Solution

We have decided to launch the new segment within the core app, so that not to split the traffic. The user needs are complimentary, the reading and listening experience can support each other. We have integrated the new segment into the core product seamlessly by scaling the basic functionality and retaining the familiar feature set for the users and adding new functionality where needed. The update covered subscription, product communication, discovery, storefront, search, author page, title page, internal services. Completely new functionality has been built based on the existing design system of the core app – audio player. The time from concept to shipment was 3 months.

Result

The new segment has added new monetization opportunities and has helped to raise the overall revenue.

Experience Summary

From the product perspective, Bookmate is a set of products for readers, publishers, individual authors, as well as internal management tools.

For readers

• A library of books in more than 15 languages in a variety of ebook formats, including comic books, audiobooks, and podcasts, available upon subscription.
• Reading engagement. Quotes, notes, book reviews, and beyond.
• Personalized recommendations based on your reading and app use history and editorial curation.
• Bookshelves. Curated book lists from prominent opinion leaders, brands, and regular users.
• Engaged reader community. Book discussions, community feed.
• Upload books into the users' personal library with the support of multiple ebook formats.
• Offline mode.
• Cross-platform experience. Bookmate is a product available across all core platforms: iOS, Android, Web, Windows Mobile, and Windows Desktop (no longer supported). It offers a fully functional experience across mobile and in-browser desktop, synched across all personal devices. This means that the app needs to be consistent in terms of design and user experience across all platforms, all the while observing the specifics of each individual platform.

For authors and publishers, internal management tools

• Reading analytics.
• Book stock management.
• Visibility of earnings distribution, based on reading activity.
• Tools for self-publishing of individual authors. — Storefront management and curation, manual featuring and algorithmic recommendations, content creation.

Back to projects