Libby Has Room To Grow In Usability and Accessiblity

I love the portability of e-book readers and the ability to instantly borrow and access e-books from my phone. The app I most often use for e-books is Libby. It has a friendly design with clear images of book covers, and it helpfully displays groups of recommended books. It’s easy to find available or popular books to check out, and there’s a handy indicator of how much of a book a user has read. The app lets a user skip ahead or back to the next chapter, add bookmarks, and search within a book. But Libby also has some usability issues. For example, when reading an e-book there’s no indicator where to tap to pull up the menu — I often have to try several different places and accidentally turn the page before I finally find it. The icons the designers have chosen are also not obvious, nor are they labeled.

There is inconsistency throughout, with buttons of different shapes and colors, clickable text that looks like regular text, and a blue and green rectangle with a checkmark means a book is downloaded. Why?

I was already a long-time user when Libby’s redesign occurred last spring, but even I found it confusing.

Libby has clearly made some efforts toward accessibility. Text can be significantly enlarged. Font, line spacing and weight are all adjustable, and the default palette is a high-contrast black on white. There’s even a font called OpenDyslexic, which is designed to be easier to read for people with dyslexia.

But although iOS VoiceOver can be used to help a visually impaired user navigate in Libby and check out books, it doesn’t work to actually read books. A user is directed to either open a book in Kindle or find the audiobook instead. There are a number of titles available as read-along, which pairs an e-book with an audio book, but those are mostly children’s titles. For audio books, the reading speed can be adjusted, but it can only be accelerated, not slowed.

Libby has a pleasant interface and some great qualities, but it could do better.

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