Kindle Library Management
Over ten years, Kindle had changed how people read, but as libraries grew to hundreds of books, readers were having trouble managing their collections. By understanding how people naturally organize their reading - from marking finished books to grouping similar titles together - I designed an experience that feels as natural as arranging books on a shelf. This transformed a frustrating task into a seamless part of the reading experience, letting readers focus on what matters: their next great book.
Role
Lead designer and researcher across iOS, Android, Fire tablets, E-readers and web
team
4 PM/TPM's
4 PM/TPM's
3 development teams (50+ engineers)
VP Kindle reading
Head of design
Cross-org collaboration
Kindle Unlimited, Prime Reading, and Goodreads teams
Understanding Our Readers: The Groove
To really understand our readers, I started a weekly newsletter I called 'the groove'. Like how a vinyl record's groove gets deeper with each play, making the needle fit better and keep the music going, this newsletter helped us dive deeper into what our readers needed and how they behaved. It reached over 200 team members across design, product, engineering, and QA in the US, UK, and India, keeping our customers in mind as we worked to make Kindle better.
Through this newsletter, we heard directly from our readers:
"I can't remember what I've read or not read so I end up opening the same books over and over."
"Although I thoroughly enjoy reading via Kindle, organization is frustrating. Other than putting books in collections, there isn't anyway to denote read, need to read, liked, don't like, read again, watch for next book in series..."
"Since I now have hundreds of titles in my library, and have read most but not all of these, it would be a really useful feature if the Kindle app allowed me to view only books where the location marker is at the start of the book."
The Complexity of 'Finished': Why Books Aren't Simple
To solve the problem of marking books as read, we needed to think about the full reader experience. Asking readers to manually mark hundreds of previously read books would just create more work - turning an exciting new feature into a tedious task. We developed an algorithm to automatically identify books readers had already finished, but the challenge was deeper than it first appeared. Books aren't uniform - they have acknowledgments, notes, indexes, even previews of other books - so we couldn't simply mark a book as 'read' when someone reached the end since we didn’t know where the end is or if they just flipped to the end to look at a note. Getting this wrong would frustrate readers and break their trust in the feature, so accuracy was crucial.
First, we sent surveys to readers showing them lists of books our algorithm had identified as read or unread, asking them to point out any mistakes. Using this feedback, we fine-tuned the algorithm - we wanted to be careful about automatically marking books, preferring not to mark a book rather than marking it incorrectly.
Once we felt confident in the algorithm, we invited readers to test this with their own libraries. We watched how they reacted to seeing their books marked as read, asked how they felt when the algorithm got it wrong and watched as they used the new features to mark books as read or unread, manage multiple books at once, and organize their collections. This helped us understand not just if the algorithm worked, but how readers felt about it.
A Unified Experience: Launching Across All Platforms
Working closely with the dev teams, we designed a library experience that puts readers in control. New badges make it easy for readers to know which books are from Prime Reading or Kindle Unlimited, and which ones they finished reading. The filter options adapt to each reader's library - if you don't have any comics in your library, you won't see a comics filter. This personalized approach extends to filter combinations, letting readers quickly find exactly what they want. We designed the filters to grow, ready for future options like genres and languages. We added a persistent filter bar to ensure readers always know they're viewing a filtered library, even after spending hours immersed in a book. For those juggling multiple books, we introduced sorting by reading progress, making it easy to pick up where they left off.
For the first time in Kindle, we introduced toast notifications providing brief, timely feedback throughout the app to help readers feel confident in their actions. When finishing a book, a toast confirms it's marked as read and synced with Goodreads, with an option to undo. Readers could now return borrowed Kindle Unlimited and Prime Reading books right from the app, no website visit needed. When returning a borrowed book, another toast assures readers it's taken care of and their notes and highlights are safely saved. Whether readers are taking these actions from the app home, library or search results, they get clear, immediate confirmation for their actions.
When presenting to Kindle's VP and leadership team, I emphasized the importance of a synchronized launch across all platforms. While this was more complex to execute, it was crucial for our readers - we didn't want to create a fragmented experience where features were available on some devices but not others. This was especially important since we were syncing book progress across devices.
We made strategic trade-offs to achieve this goal. Rather than delay the launch to include every possible feature, we focused on core functionality that would immediately improve readers' daily experience. Additional features like genre filters were planned for future updates, allowing us to deliver value to users quickly while building a foundation for ongoing improvements.
Reader Response: The Impact of Thoughtful Design
We launched these improvements simultaneously across iOS, Android, Fire tablets, and E-readers - a first for Kindle. This transformed how readers manage their libraries, addressing key pain points that previously dominated app store reviews, and driving 5-star iOS App Store ratings from millions of readers. Instead of keeping track of read books manually or switching between apps to return borrowed books, readers could now focus on what matters - finding their next great read, no matter how large their library grows.
Readers quickly embraced these changes:
"I LOVE the new update that shows books you have read and unread. This was a terrific feature to add. My books go back 6 years. With a large library of 668 books since 2013... This makes it so easy to find them now."
"I'm so glad you listened to me and enabled borrow returns within the Kindle app"
"I've been using this app for years now and my only issue with it is that it has no way to separate the books, from samples, from kindle or prime books. Really really annoying that this basic feature was missing. But they just added it and that prompted me to finally review the app. Thank you to whoever made this happen."
You can see these features live across Kindle on iOS and Android, any Kindle e-reader or Amazon Fire tablet.
