Fable: A Product Teardown

Fable sits in a crowded room. Everyone here solves a slice of "reading, socially"; nobody owns all of it.

Five personas, built around the different reasons someone opens a reading app.

Users should be able to filter books and shows by genre. As an avid reader and binge-watcher, I search by mood. Am I in the mood for a thriller? A romantic comedy? Or do I want a knight in shining armour riding in to save his princess? Genre-based filtering makes that possible.

There are a couple of ways to build it. The prerequisite either way is tagging genre on the book record in the database. After that, you can let users search a genre directly and return results.

The simpler route is a "Filter" button that opens the available genres. The user selects the ones they want and hits Apply.

One of the best ways to foster a community and build a new habit is to give people a way to bond over it.

Samsung Health, a fairly basic healthcare app, sees over 300,000 MAU on its monthly walking challenges and the leaderboards that come with them.

Duolingo, like Fable, uses streaks to build a habit. The difference is in the packaging: the animation that celebrates a streak increasing, badges for personal accomplishments, and notifications with actual personality. Worth noting for later: Duolingo has a "Mistake Mechanic": it rewards you for going back and fixing your mistakes. It gives you a badge, essentially, for having made them.

Fable already has streaks. It hasn't yet turned them into a reason to open the app every single day.

A basic version of Wrapped already exists as Monthly Wrapped. There is no one alive who could convince me against Wrapped, but I think bi-yearly or yearly makes far more sense here. Realistically, people read a median of about 4 books a year.

Books read per person per year · Source: World Population Review, 2024

Even in the countries that read the most, that's under two books a month. Which means a monthly Wrapped looks rather empty. I'm speaking from personal experience. Over six months or a year, there's actually something to show:

The same treatment works for people logging television and film.

And instead of "Wrapped", the team could own the name: "Fable Footprints", or "Chronicles of <year>".

Fable's current streak log does its job. It's a list of dates, and you tap into one to log a book.

A calendar view would do the same job more intuitively, with the current date auto-selected. A green outline can mark the days a user already logged. To log another day, they tap that date, which takes them to the "choose book" page, and the date turns green. To deselect, tap the date again.

Then there's placement. Streak logging currently sits in the middle of the home feed, surrounded by unrelated information. Moving it to the user page segregates all the user's own data from that chaos.

While I'm on the user page: instead of a "View Network" link that leads off to following and followers, why not show that metric on the page itself? I've used "Longest Streak" as a third metric. It could just as easily be "Lifetime Books", "Total Reading Time" or "Total Pages Read".

Three things about this sheet bother me as a user:

1. No book name. Adding the book's title to the sheet reassures the user they tapped the right book.
2. Removing should be symmetrical. To remove a book from the library, tapping the selected radio button again should do the trick.
3. "Remove from library" sits where "Save" should be. Because of its placement, it gets confused with Save. This page has a vertical decision-making flow, so the Save button belongs at the bottom of the sheet.

Fable currently sustains itself through:

• Affiliate and direct book sales: Fable likely earns a cut of purchases made through the app.
• Partnerships and licensing: collaborations with authors and publishers.

To grow, it will need more than that. Some directions:

I obviously don't know what resources the Fable team has, so these are rough estimates. I used the RICE framework.

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed making it. I'm open to any feedback you have.