Founded in 2015, Papereed is a Swedish-based startup offering a range of audio services. Created by visionaries who believe that “great content deserves to be listened to”, it offers Papereed Audio—a digital subscription service that streams audio articles.

Focus on Accessibility

The Papereed project marks the next step in our initiative highlighting the importance of accessibility in mobile products design and development. After releasing a comprehensive report on accessibility in mobile apps, discussing #PositiveTech subject during MCE 2017, the Papereed project gave us a unique opportunity to put all these ideas in motion through creating an accessible iOS app followed by user testing.

Polidea’s role

Papereed’s solution is accompanied by a mobile application which enables listening to audio recordings of narrators reading articles from magazines. Users can create playlists of articles and save articles and playlists on their phones.

Our task was to create an accessible iOS app—attractive, intuitive and easy to use for all the users; those suffering from vision impairment, those who are blind and those fully sighted. Keeping them in mind, we implemented a wide range of native solutions in order to guarantee the smooth usage of accessibility features (e.g Dynamic Types). Thanks to this, we could control the way it would be seen on different devices.

In order to make the content accessible to everybody, our Creative Team (now, Utilo—Polidea’s design studio) contributed to the project by organizing accessibility tests and providing Papereed with a comprehensive report on accessibility features and recommendations for further development. To get more insights on user testing and get familiar with the process and our experiences with conducting the study, read our series of posts starting here.

Project execution

The Papereed project was unique due to the super smooth cooperation between the teams. It started with 2 days of kick-off workshops and was clearly structured later on—two designers from Utilo collaborated closely with Papereed’s two representatives, while the developers were working on the internal structure. All project members communicated on a daily basis—thanks to this project setup, all the stakeholders were fully informed. 2 days of face-to-face workshops were followed by 2 video calls a week (one devoted to design, the other to demo). The flexibility of Papereed team was truly inspiring and contributed to the project’s smooth execution. After 3 months, Utilo prepared user testing scenarios and organized the study.

Ola Andersson

Founder,
Papereed

With no prior experience in designing fully accessible software it was of great help to be able to work with Polidea. They quickly understood the core concept of our ideas and could turn them into tangible designs, and, later on, code. By involving real users in the process they ensured at an early stage that the app is truly usable, not just on paper but also in real user scenarios.

If you want to check it out, the app is already available in App Store.