Building a Reading Habit Through Listen

This post is Part 1 of a two part series. Part 2 is here.

Many of us read to learn, grow, be inspired, stay informed and satisfy our appetite for curiosity. At Pocket, it’s at the heart of our mission to create a place for you to spend time with the content you love. But while many of us aspire to read each day, it often feels hard, if not impossible, to find the time to sit down and focus. In between the crowded commutes, work to get done, responsibilities to attend to, and errands to run, the possibility of being able to finally sit down with our Pocket list without falling asleep (c’mon we’ve all done it) feels far away. In fact, it is a common refrain that we often hear from our Pocket users. One Pocket user that we chatted with said it best:

Our data shows that less than half of the stories pocketed (yes, it’s a verb) by people are ever opened. The great stories that get pocketed are never read and begin to get buried in ever-growing lists.

As a result, our team started looking at ways that we might tackle this challenge — to help Pocket users read more of what they save in ways that better fit their lives.

We began exploring alternative ways that users could “read” the stories in their list. Audio immediately surfaced as a distinct possibility. It is not a novel or new concept — listening to text is something that many regularly do today through text-to-speech, audiobooks, author-recorded articles, and even podcasts to an extent.

In fact, Pocket has already had text-to-speech functionality built in for over the past several years. Unfortunately, it was difficult to discover and the 90s-era robotic voice, was hard for the majority of people (including myself) to listen to. Yet even with all of these existing challenges, a small, but loyal set of people used Pocket’s text-to-speech function to churn through dozens of stories in their lists while doing other tasks such as driving, walking the doggos, or hitting the gym.

We sat down 1-on-1 with 15 of our Pocket users and surveyed hundreds more in order to better understand how we might approach the challenge of creating an audio-driven space. How would listen help Pocket users read more of what they saved? How could we design a listening experience in Pocket that would help our users accomplish this?

After a couple days of great conversation and an abundance of notes, we distilled all of our research into key insights that helped guide us and build the foundation of our listen experience.

As we talked with our users, a clear pattern emerged that showed us we were on the right path — reading is a singular activity, listening is combined. Over and over again, our users told us about the freedom that listening to written content afforded them. Many felt that they were able to take advantage of common moments throughout their day when their hands and eyes were busy, but their ears are not. It was simply more convenient than reading — and when time and energy is limited, convenience always wins.

Unsurprisingly, the quality of the spoken voice was the primary attractor and detractor for listening to written content. This is particularly important for Pocket as we rely on voice technology and speech engines to synthesize written content. If the voice was more human, dynamic, and engaging, people found that they would almost prefer listening over reading. However, if the voice was robotic, monotonous, and slow, people felt that they were not able to listen for more than a minute or so without tuning out.

This may feel like an obvious statement and it is. But it was an important reminder that even if we spent days designing the perfect player UI or embedded audio experience, it would ultimately fail if the voice did not improve.

For many of the Pocket user’s we chatted with, not all content is made or valued equally. The listenability of an article varied drastically based on user’s perception of density, value, and content type.

Some users wanted to read and savor certain stories or publishers. Others had dense, technical articles saved for work or school that they felt they had to read in order to process. On the flip-side, to stay informed, short news articles were considered ideal for listening. Funny stories written by celebrities or bloggers were also considered great listen candidates as users felt they’d otherwise never get around to reading stories like these.

We learned that there seemed to be 2 modes of listening– active and passive. It is important to make the distinction that active and passive listening are not types of listeners. An individual can switch (and often does) between active and passive listening within the day or sometimes even within a session.

Active listening is when people aspire to be productive and learn. As a result, the primary need during active listening is to comprehend and retain the information they’ve heard. Passive listening is when people seek to be entertained or pass time. The primary need during passive listening is less about retention and more around creating an enjoyable environment or mood.

We learned that while in active listening mode, users are more tolerant of a lower quality voice because their overriding need is to learn and to be productive. They are not seeking or expecting a highly produced experience (think podcasts). While voice technology has made vast improvements over the past few years (Alexa anyone?), today’s computerized voices are still not as good as, say, a celebrity-read. So we decided to focus on creating a great experience for the active listening mode.

Together in a few short, busy months, we’ve researched, designed, built, tested, and released Pocket listen into your hands (or ears 😉). It’s been an exhilarating ride so far but is only the very beginning with much more work ahead. We know there is various functionality and features that we need to improve and are tirelessly working to do. We have built the foundation for an experience that we are incredibly excited to continue to improve on with feedback from you and all of our Pocket users.

A huge warm thank you and shout out to the entire Pocket Listen and Design team as well as Mozilla’s Scout Team who helped bring listen to life for all our Pocket users! And to you, for reading this article and putting up with my all my face-palm worthy audio puns. ✌️

To learn more about how we used these insights to craft our “final” design, check out Building a Better Reading Habit Through Listen, Part 2!

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