Rethinking Read Aloud for Word mobile

Read Aloud is a text to speech feature in Microsoft Word. It was first introduced on Word for Windows, where users could find the option under the Review tab and click it to start listening to their document from the current cursor position.

Problem Statement

How can we help users consume documents on their mobile devices using audio as a modality?

Context

Our usage metrics showed that Word on mobile devices is used a lot more for reading documents, and less for editing or creating new documents. My hypothesis was that Read Aloud would be used very differently on mobile compared to desktop.

I conducted user studies to find out more about how mobile users consume information with voice, and proposed mobile-specific design improvements for Read Aloud.