Product design question
How do you improve book/pdf/article reading experience on Chrome in mobile or tablet?
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product sense on a content consumption experience, balanced against Chrome's role as a general browser rather than a dedicated reader app.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: reading long form articles and PDFs specifically, not general browsing.
- Segment users: casual skimmers versus people trying to finish a long article or e-book chapter.
- Identify pain points: small text, ads and pop ups breaking flow, no way to resume where you left off.
- Prioritize a distraction free reading mode with automatic reading position sync across devices.
- Propose enhancing Reader Mode with adjustable font, dark mode, and cross device resume via the user's Google account.
- Define success as average session read time and reader mode adoption on long articles.
What a strong answer includes
- Builds on Chrome's actual existing Reader Mode rather than ignoring it.
- Uses a concrete metric, for example assuming articles over 1500 words see reader mode use in 20 percent of visits once enabled.
- Weighs the trade off with ad revenue for publishers, since stripping ads affects site owners.
- Considers PDF reading separately, since PDFs need different controls like page jump and zoom.
Common mistakes
- Ignoring that this cannibalizes publisher ad revenue, a real stakeholder concern for Chrome.
- Proposing a brand new app instead of improving the existing browser feature.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you get publisher buy in for a feature that strips their ads?
- How would you measure whether reading completion actually improved?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop