Design Definition
Managing the Scope of a Multi-year Project
Thanks to its importance, the book detail page had collected a dizzying number of components over the years. To focus our strategy, my team partners and I conducted an audit of everything that comprised a Book detail page.
Including edge cases and temporary states, we identified 65 distinct features contained within the template.
Above: A list of book detail page features, their categorizations, and priority. This list has been reviewed according to the Amazon’s internal data protection policy and contains no confidential information.
Competing Priorities
To maintain our launch timeline, we had to ruthlessly prioritize the most important features of the book page. But large or small, all of these features potential to impact our customer experience. We based our prioritization based on a feature’s importance to our customers, partners and stakeholders:
Customers and Partners
Readers Learning about a book.
Readers Deepening their relationship with a book.
Authors and Publishers of books
Advertisers on Goodreads
Amazon Kindle, our parent company
Internal Stakeholders
Revenue Team
Data Science
Editorial
Brand & Public Relations
Design Department
Head of Product
Goodreads CEO
Amazon VP of Kindle
Features were evaluated based on historical usage analytics, and the scope of work involved to rebuild existing functionality in React.js. From there we defined a production timeline for a feature set that would support a phased release: beta program, a minimum viable product (A/B tested), and a series of post-rollout releases.
A key goal of my design directive was to simplify the product, so I used this analysis to target a number of features for potential deprecation. We cut 10 features from the existing book page, streamlining user experience, improving page performance, and reducing ongoing maintenance costs.
As this analysis was ongoing, I had already begun to iterate on the redesigns of the book page’s most important features.