Penguin Random House gave us the opportunity to work on a critical tool for the audiobook industry: a new CMS and mobile apps for their staff and partners to manage the promotion, distribution and consumption of audiobooks. This is a story about the why, the how and the what of this exciting technology project.
Our goals were to:
- Create a scalable process for posting audiobooks and content to the app
- Empower staff to manage the system
- Create a delightful user experience for industry users and consumers
- Create a maintainable and secure system for IT
- Get useful insights into user behaviors to identify areas for improvement
Our work involved:
- Understanding business problems, business goals, system actors and their needs
- Understanding technical landscape and requirements
- Particular deep-dive into security requirements
- Replacing the existing app for staff and industry
- Creating a new web app, the admin portal or CMS, for staff only.
- Think through and implement analytics requirements balanced with privacy considerations
The technologies we employed were a factor of fitting the current IT landscape, getting to market effectively, and giving PRH the tools and framework to build with. Hence, lots of AWS, React Native app, mobile, API and web best practices.
The stack included two relatively new pieces of tech:
- Amazon Cognito for user sign-in
- Amazon Pinpoint for push notifications
For both of these, we learned how best to interface the Amazon-provided system with our own app and web systems, and how to ensure ops teams could use and troubleshoot easily.
The PRH Audio app is available for both Android and iOS as a tool for the audiobook industry: booksellers, national media, bloggers, librarians, educators and more. We are immensely grateful for having had the chance to be part of this world, and proud of the work we've done to help make that world a little bit better.
