STEVE JOBS'
BIOGRAPHY eBOOK
CASE STUDY
INTRO.
When it comes to presenting content through an eBook or any type of medium, the best way to help people retain the most information is to include media assets and interactive features, not just text. Information that is presented with solely just text makes for a dull, boring experience and will often times lose a reader’s interest. Who wants to read dense text? The answer is: no one.
APPROACH.
The two main design principles that I kept in mind when creating this project, as well as my audiobook project, were: KISS (“Keep it simple, stupid) and consistency since I wanted to create a seamless experience that was relevant to my topic — Steve Jobs.
In order for me to create an effective, meaningful experience for the readers of my Steve Jobs’ eBook, I had to go through the product design process — research, ideation, implementation, testing, and publishing.
RESEARCH.
At this stage, I had to look into what kind of information was available to me. I knew from the start that I wasn’t going to create an entire eBook for the Steve Jobs book (due to time constraints) so I had to consider what information I wanted and what I wanted to leave out for this project.
Problem #1: What chapters of the book did I want to present to someone who wanted a brief overview of Steve Jobs’ life without having to read the entire (577+ page) book?
Problem #2: What assets, besides the text, did I think was necessary to include to augment the reader experience?
Problem #3: How was I going to lay out the media assets that I collected?
Problem #4: What features from iBooks Author did I want to integrate into my eBook?
Solution: It all came down to research. First, I looked over all the chapter titles of the book to see what intrigued me the most. After spending some time learning about some chapters of Steve Jobs’ life, I came to the conclusion that chapters 1, 3, 5, 9, and 42 were the most impactful. Why? These chapters were major milestones in Steve’s life. Although the other chapters in the book are just as important as the chapters that I chose, I felt as if these sections conveyed the most of some lesser known turning points of Steve’s life.
IMPLEMENTATION.
The first thing that I collected was the text from the chapters that I wanted from the eBook. In order to acquire this content, I went to the location of where the book was purchased — the Kindle App. Shown below is what the text looked like from the actual Kindle App and from the physical book.
The reason why I chose to justify all the text, rather than aligning everything to the left was because I wanted the eBook to somehow still resemble the physical book. Rather than having just a straight left edge and an uneven right edge, I wanted the text to be cleaner and to have a more formal look and feel to it.
COVER ART.
The chapters are broken up by the different years that certain things were occurring in Steve’s life — 1955, 1972, 1976, 1980, and 2011. The masked image of the number will be related to whatever is going on in that specific chapter. Take Chapter 1, for example; since this is a chapter that explains Steve’s childhood, I used an image of Steve as a baby. Later on in this chapter, I also included a gallery of a few pictures.
FEATURES.
Glossary Terms: Text that can be found in the glossary are denoted in bold. Once clicked, a pop-up with a short, scrollable description of the glossary term appears. For most of the characters in the book, I included a picture and a quote. When looking for assets, a lot of the pictures that I found were in black and white. Therefore, I put a light, black overlay over the images to match the rest of the eBook more.
Glossary Terms: Text that can be found in the glossary are denoted in bold. Once clicked, a pop-up with a short, scrollable description of the glossary term appears. For most of the characters in the book, I included a picture and a quote. When looking for assets, a lot of the pictures that I found were in black and white. Therefore, I put a light, black overlay over the images to match the rest of the eBook more.
Pop-ups: Like the glossary term feature, pop-ups also have a small description box that appears over the page, when clicked. The only difference is that instead of clicking a bolded text, the reader has to click on an icon. By clicking on the Apple logo icon, readers can learn random facts about Apple.
Video: In Chapter 4 where it talks about Apple going public and becoming successful, I included a short video clip of Steve Jobs giving advice on the key to success. I did this because placing a video in a highly text-dense project is a great way to present quick, rich, and engaging content to help give the reader additional information.
Hype Widgets: Rather than having features that were mainly static, I decided to include a few Hype animation features to upgrade the overall experience. In the first example, shown below, I created a short animation of the evolution of Apple’s logos.
In the second example below, the graph appears when clicked within the eBook (the animation is not looped like a gif in the actual eBook but for demonstration purposes here, I used a gif).
TESTING.
One of the most tedious, yet important steps when creating any product is testing. Testing is critical as it allows you to uncover any UX problems that need to be resolved. Sometimes, depending on what type of device someone is on, the layout of the content may change. For this particular project, I tested my eBook on my MacBook Pro and my iPad Mini.
MACBOOK PRO
For the most part, I didn’t have any trouble assembling the content the way that I wanted it. I had to tweak a few default settings to avoid problems like inconsistent line spacing between paragraphs and a few other problems that I will be discussing below.
Problem #1: The text of the title automatically switched to lower-case (even though it was all capitalized in the editing application) when I viewed the eBook in Preview mode.
Solution: I went back to my original chapter cover art files and created .PNG files of the text so that I could just insert the title as a picture.
Problem #2: Whenever I placed an image onto a page, it didn't align properly. I wanted the image to be centered, but for whatever reason, iBooks Author’s setting didn't enable me to change that.
Solution: I found out that the gallery widget automatically centered objects so instead of having a single image that was off-centered, I found extra pictures and inserted a gallery instead.
Another thing that I changed from my original design was the color of the pictures. Instead of having colored pictures, I edited them to match the look of the old pictures that I found of Steve and Apple.
IPAD MINI
You would think that my eBook would appear the same way on my iPad as it did on my MacBook, nope!
Problem #1: Sometimes, the placement of media like photo galleries and videos affected the way the text appeared on my iPad Mini. In some chapters, the implementation of assets left a huge gap in between paragraphs.
Solution: I had to rearrange content to try my best to eliminate the awkward white space as much as possible. In this example, I moved the photo gallery a few paragraphs down. Although the gap isn’t entirely gone in this particular section, as you can see below, it got less prominent.
CONCLUSION.
After testing and resolving problems a few more times to make sure everything was functioning and appearing properly, I was done! Although I’m pretty satisfied with my end result, there is definitely a lot of room for improvement and I still don’t feel as if I am completely done. The product design cycle is a perpetual cycle that needs to be taken seriously. Each phase of the cycle requires different skills and efforts, and needs to be repeated to enhance the experience of the product. If it weren’t for all the steps that I went through, this project would have been extremely difficult. Taking the time to set a well-formatted foundation and direction for this project was extremely valuable to me as it helped me develop a workflow that aimed towards my goal of creating a seamless, engaging experience of an eBook in a non-traditional way.
To view my entire Steve Jobs’ eBook, make sure you have the iBooks app on your device and then download the file here for free. :)
© ELLIE HOYT © 2018