Papereed started with a vision and has, during the course of three years, evolved into a launched solution. Follow some of the steps on this journey and see examples of my UX-related work in the process.

The vision is fundamental to starting the journey. It indicates where you want to go. And why.

In my case I needed to get more time to read magazine and newspaper content, and I envisioned to make this content audible which would let me listen to it while biking to work.

To make this happen I had to be able to tell a story around it. So, I created user stories.

I planned to approach media houses with my stories. In order not to come with slideware only I opted for building a quick prototype to support the pitching deck.

The prototype itself was quite limited in functionality and only contained a few articles. To strenthen the case I included some designs to show potential improvements to the prototype.

Precursor to the logotype is the name, Papereed. It is based on the fact that we were to read papers to you, therefore Paper + Read. Then tweaking ‘read’ into ‘reed’, which is sort of a synonym for papyrus, which also is sort of a paper.

Clever? Not really… in retrospective I understand the name should have reflected what you can do with the service (listen) instead of what we do (read). And people never get the spelling right, obviously.

Anyway, based on the papyrus association I wanted to give the logo an Egyptian touch with the typeface. Then also turning one E and putting a few reeds (leaves) in the background to form part of a logomark that would be easy to recognize.

A few designs and screenshots from our apps for web, iOS and Android.

Content is what we live on and content is why people are using our service. The guiding principle behind all app designs is therefore quite obvious, to put the content in the front row.

I've tried to do this by minimizing the effort needed by the user to find good content, simplifying navigation flows as much as possible, prioritize ease-of-use over features and keep the visual language at a low key to make the content stand out.