Kindle Enterprise Publishing
Convergence Project
The Convergence project aimed to establish Kindle Enterprise Publisher (KEP) as the sole platform for publishers, creating a single code base and eliminating the need for publishers to use Vendor Central and Publish to Kindle (P2K). A key challenge was maintaining feature parity; every function available in Vendor Central and P2K needed to be seamlessly integrated into KEP while providing an enhanced user experience.
My role:
Lead UX Designer
Facilitation of design sprints
User research
Ideation, conceptual design
Prototyping
Problem Statement
Before Convergence, publishers had to navigate multiple platforms to manage their Kindle titles. This fragmented experience led to inefficiencies, errors, and a steep learning curve for new users. The project sought to consolidate all publishing tools into KEP, offering a unified, efficient, and user-friendly experience.
Objectives
Consolidation: provide all necessary publisher tools within KEP, eliminating the need for Vendor Central and P2K
Feature parity: ensure that publishers didn’t lose any functionality from the platforms
User experience enhancement: Improve the overall usability of the platform, simplifying complex workflows and reducing friction for publishers
Design Approach
Research and analysis: conducting user research sessions with a variety of publishers to understand their workflows, pain points, and feature dependencies
Audit: a comprehensive audit across the platforms to understand the landscape and identify gaps, issues that the team would need to consider
Information architecture: designing an intuitive, logical navigation system within KEP that mirrored the familiar workflows of Vendor Central and P2K
Iterative design & testing: creating prototypes and conducting usability tests to validate design decisions, ensuring feature parity while enhancing the overall experience
Future vision
This initiative was part of a larger project in the Books organization to bring multiple feature teams together to create a unified publishing experience; that work is still ongoing.