Looking Into the LibriVox App (3/17)

*Long post warning*

Today I got back late to school, so I decided to work not on refactoring but to check into the LibriVox apps for Android. After all, not only will they provide a good example of how our app should work, but it will also give us insight into what features we should add. I took some notes on it below.

How it works

• Starts with an asking for rating screen. While I don't think we should do this immediately, I think that we should ask the user to eventually rate our app, as an app with more ratings is better for us and users. We can improve on certain features, while new users finding the app for the first time can see what people think about it.
• Immediately, it starts you off at a home screen that displays Top Free, Top Paid, and New apps. I like this feature - it reminds me of some other apps I have used. All of the top books' covers are shown, which is also possible to do via RSS or the API. It adds a clean UI interface to this with a nice color scheme.
• I had to look over this a few times, but I realized there was a "Top Paid" category. I thought LibriVox's goal was free and public domain audiobooks...?
• There is a search icon as well, at the top, just like our app.
• You can go into more books on the top sections, and also view them, with their covers shown.
• Clicking on the app gives it some time to load, instead of immediately going to the next screen. The player has a clean interface, and also allows you to look at the description, similar books, and go to chapter selection. There's a share icon, favorite icon, and sleep icon.
• All search results are conducted without a loading screen, and all books are shown with their covers.

My Opinion

The LibriVox app is full of features, and as an Android app it's very well put together. I am in no way saying that we should have all these features, or none of them, but I'd like to go over a few and say how I liked and disliked them. That way, we can adapt certain features, maybe with better methods. As a result, we can help towards making a better app!

• I loved the cover-based UI for books on the home screen. The "Top Free", etc. categories were very nice as well. However, once we got to search results, I found that covers just got in the way. I much prefer our search results with simple title and description. I'm thinking, however, that some people will like the cover in search results. As a result, I have proposed a few solutions. One is that we allow for different types of results, similar to how in Windows and OSX (Linux too, possibly?) you can switch the way you look at your search results - IE if you're looking at images, and you just want to see the filename, or want to see the image, or both, you can choose either. I'd also like to propose having a ListView with Thumbnails via JQuery Mobile. That way, we could have a small icon of the book's cover, along with a name and description, so the user can have more information on the novel if needed.
• I like the idea of share and favorite buttons. After all, if you really like a book, I'm sure anyone would want to recommend it to friends, especially if it's completely free to listen to. Not only is this a helpful feature for users, but it also allows your app to be shared more if both users are on FirefoxOS. We should look into different methods of sharing, and include linking to the LibriFox App/LibriVox when the book is shared. Favoriting is also great, and we could make a feature such that a user can access their favorited books with ease [possibly a folder]. A "download favorites" button would be an interesting feature to look into as well.
• I also appreciated the "Similar" category when you were listening to a book. I'm not exactly sure how this would be done, however we should look into it.
• I think we need to look into more UI coding as well (with CSS). Using a non-default JQuery Mobile theme would be nicer in my opinion.
• The loading screen was nice, but I'm not really sure if it was needed. I hate seeing loading screens on my phone when I'm using apps, so maybe it would be best to just not have one. A splash screen, however, would be nice.
• Bookmarks were really nice. These would be an easy feature to add.
• Reviews were also nice, I'm not sure how they would be implemented without some sort of hosting (possibly a database?), but they would be nice as well.
• One thing it seemed that this app lacked was a full file manager and a download file option. Maybe I didn't do enough exploring. Sure, the LibriVox Downloader app does this, but why split it into two? I feel as if it's easy enough to implement, so we might as well have one and keep it all in one app.

That's all the notes I have for now, I think they will be very helpful after we refactor a bit more! I will be taking more notes on the LibriVox Downloader app soon, possibly tomorrow. I was also very surprised to see that the Android app has 1-5 million installs, 60 thousand reviews, and offers in-app purchases. While I don't think in-app purchases in a LibriVox app makes sense, I would like to do some experimentation with Kumar's library!

The downloader, on the other hand, only had 50 thousand to 100 thousand installs. Regardless, this is still a very large amount of people, and shows that a feature should be added to the main LibriVox app to implement the feature! I hope that our app will include it, as I've now realized how important it is to have one.