Kindle Enterprise Publishing (KEP)
KEP is a publishing platform for enterprise publishers to manage their book titles in the Amazon store. One challenge with the existing experience is that KEP only handles digital books (e-books) forcing many publishers to manage their titles (print, digital, audiobooks) in different places, adding redundancy to their workflow.
Design Sprint: 2020 and Beyond
Three day design sprint with cross-functional team to explore the future-state of the Publisher experience. We gathered Publisher personas and existing feedback/research to create a Publisher journey map that captured the Publisher journey from initiation of author/publisher contract to author payment.
Design challenge: How might we create a best-in-class, holistic and efficient experience that delights and empowers Publishers at Amazon?
Long term goal: One place for Publishers to run their business on Amazon for all book formats, known and unknown.
Storyboard
After sketching and voting on winning ideas, I facilitated a storyboarding session with the team.
Key Publisher themes:
”Show me what’s wrong so I can quickly fix it”
”Make it easy for me to add and manage all title formats”
Publisher Dashboard: mixed role (smaller publisher)
Smaller Publishers tend to manage titles in addition to reporting functions, even if compiling reports for their finance department.
Streamlined workflow: Dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of one’s titles and surfaces issues and timely tasks to help Publishers prioritize what’s most important right now.
Contextual recommendations: Publishers want help in forecasting: what is the value of having a digital book? How can I extend the life of a title on Amazon?
Sketching First
I often sketch out ideas and concepts before opening my laptop. The majority of Publishers would go to Amazon’s PDP to troubleshoot issues with their titles. When one is reviewing many titles, this is very time consuming. I wanted to create a detail page where Publishers could see an approximation of what their title would look out in the Product Detail Page (PDP) and edit inline.
Detail Page (1x1)
with in-line editing capability. Publishers told us they mostly identify issues with their titles on the Amazon Detail Page. They go back and forth between the Publisher tool and the site to understand and fix issues. This solution gives them an idea of how their titles will look within the Publisher tool so they can quickly identify and fix issues.
Detail Page with issues
Publishers can quickly see any issues that might be causing their titles to be suppressed or at risk of being suppressed.