As a part of a product team I helped develop Outread, a speed-reading app for iOS. It’s goal is to help people get through their reading lists.

I worked on mockups, user research, prepared interactive prototypes and UI designs. I helped with strategy, marketing efforts and App Store optimization.

During our research phase we interviewed users of existing speed reading apps. The main reason they used an app like that was to get through saved articles or books. Most of the people felt overwhelmed by their reading lists.

All speed-reading apps at the time were based on the RSVP technique – flashing one word at a time. It makes you read much faster without any loss in comprehension.

However, users of those apps reported they often felt they lose the context. Since they didn’t see the whole page, there was no sense of what they are currently reading. Was it a part of a dialog or was it a quote? They didn’t get a feeling of where they are in the text. It was especially hard when they got distracted or dozed off. It was really hard to go back to the right spot then.

We decided to look for a better approach. One technique caught my eye – guided reading. In short, you take a pen, point it at the beginning of the page, slide it through the text and try to keep up with your eyes. That was interesting.

Turns out during reading your eyes are often going back to reread the words, even when they were already absorbed. Guided reading teaches your eyes to move more efficiently through the text.

To simulate this technique Outread shows a full page of text, but guides your eyes through it by highlighting small parts of the text, in sequence. This technique helps you keep a fast pace, and what’s more, seeing the whole text makes the speed reading feel natural.

With the speed-reading part figured out I could move on to the main problem – getting through reading lists.

I led an UX Workshop to work through gathered feedback and insights. We identified the MVP feature set, but decided to make sure all of those features are perfectly implemented.

I prepared a low-fi prototype and used it for quick user testing. During those sessions I was able to figure out the best metaphor for this type of app – a music player, but for text.

Play/pause button to control the highlighter, rewind/forward to control it’s position, skip to move on to the next article. This made the app intuitive to use and very easy to pick up.

After the launch we focused on gathering feedback for new features. We conducted a series of A/B tests and closely followed our analytics data.

I was also responsible for App Store Optimization, making sure we always have the best converting assets for each release.

Outread did one thing, and did it well. We solved one specific problem and only then expanded on the solution.

To our surprise, it quickly turned out that the RSVP technique was a must have feature. People stayed for the highlighting mode, but came looking for a RSVP they’ve been seeing everywhere. We had to redesign the app to accommodate both.