At a glance
Role. Product Designer, the only designer on the team.
Period. The redesign shipped between November and December 2024, and Reader 2 in April 2026.
The 2024 redesign
What it does. The reader is where people spend their time: they read, listen, highlight, adjust the page and move between chapters. I redesigned all of it: the toolbars, notes and quotes, search, dark mode, SmartZoom, the audiobook player, onboarding and the interface of Vito AI, the reader's AI assistant. I handed it off to four developers and an external partner, and it shipped to every client between November and December 2024, five months after I joined.
Key decision
I left the reading page almost empty and moved every control to a single settings layer. In the old reader, the icons and bars kept pulling attention away from the book.
Before
After
Between December 2024 and April 2026 it was used by hundreds of thousands of readers across hundreds of stores, on the web and in the apps. Together they spent millions of hours reading.
Reader 2: a prototype in under a week
A major new client arrived with a long list of reader changes to match what they had with their previous provider. In under a week I had a prototype with every one of those changes applied, built with Claude Code inside the reader's real codebase, and that is what we showed the client. Before that I ran a benchmark against VitalSource. When someone asked for a "night vision" mode, I proposed accessible reading modes instead, the way Kindle and Apple Books do it. The prototype had unified side panels, reading modes with AA contrast, accessible fonts, notes and Flashcards, and I published it on an online environment for reader prototypes that I set up for it and that the team still uses every day.
That prototype ended up as the base of the product. Reader 2 shipped in April 2026 with the prototype's panels and fonts, and in June came Flashcards, the first study tool built into the reader. In September, an education client presented the platform to universities in Brazil using my prototype as the demo.
