Bookworm
Creating a community of fellow bookworms.
Role: Sole UI/UX Designer & Researcher
Duration: 3 days (July 2022)
Client: Self Conducted Project
Tools: Figma
The Problem
I'm personally very interested in books, but a common problem that occurs during my reading method is knowing which type of book to read.
​
So, the question I am attempting to answer is:
​
How might we design a tool for readers to better support their reading endeavors?
Solution
Introducing Bookworm, an application that allows for readers to make their own booklist and explore other books they might be interested in.
Sprint 1: Quick Online Research
I went online and conducted some quick research, looking into Reddit, other book competitors (Goodreads), and my own personal experiences.
​
A few things:
-
People find recommendations online a lot
-
Social Media, other people, book instagram etc.​
-
-
It's hard to read sometimes because it's the process of finding good books is hard!
-
Commitment to start a book can be hard
-
Sprint 2: Define
After conducting research, I started to brainstorm ideas for the application. From the research I found that a lot of people find book recommendations from social media sites. This prompted me to think more about creating a social media type application that emphasized community and sharing of ideas. I decided on the main features of the application taking into consideration the short time scope:
​
-
Easy browsing of catered books
-
Follow & friend to see what others are reading
-
Create book recommendation posts & videos
-
Rate books & write reviews
Sprint 3: Prototyping
Low Fidelity
I focused on creating a cohesive layout and implementing easily usable ideas for each of the low fidelity prototypes. I aded a sample book (Where the Crawdads Sing) to see how the general look of the application would be.
Mid Fidelity
After creating a lo-fi prototype, I continued to edit to create mid-fi protoytpes that would be open for user testing. Along the way, I edited and added a few features:
Add, share, and extra actions for each book
Completed, reading now, plan to read, boards sections
User Testing
After creating a mid-fidelity prototype that had the general features, ideas, and visual design implemented, I took it for user testing. Through this process, I focused on analyzing whether the user could easily do the action asked ("Add the book, Wrong Place Wrong Time to your board.") and asking if they would like to see any features or changes that would better improve the application.
Before
After
Keep track of your reading goal
Private ratings will be shown only to you
Added rating at the bottom of each book for easier reading
First read & reread dates
Filter by to allow users to find thier books easier
Number of books, search bar & add books
Choice of keeping the rating & review private
Final Prototype
Keep track of the books you’ve read, are reading now, and are planning to read.
Depending on the user’s choice of putting their profile on public or private, their followers will be able to see these books, creating a more fun reading experience and allowing followers to easily gain book recommendations.
Easily find book recommendations
Users can choose which book genre, look at the tailored recommendations, or search for books to read the synopsis and read reviews. Or, they can browse through the explore section to look at posts that other users have created.
Create book recommendation posts
Users can create posts that help others find good recommendations. Whether it be individual book reviews or a video compilation of the best autobiographies, users have the option to create any posts.
Overall, I found it very rewarding to see that I had learned a lot from my first individual case study. I was also pleasantly surprised how quickly one could create a prototype. One major thing I learned is that it's important to create user journeys when creating an application. Especially because I wanted to complete this project quickly, I thought it would be okay to skip that step, but as I was looking over my final prototype, I realized that I had missed some steps that could have hindered the users from reaching their goals.
​
For the future, I would love to refine the project by adding more flows and frames that would better complete prototype. Some interesting ideas that this application could expand into would be a reward based reading application in which there would be leaderboards, goals, and friendly competition. It definitely would be interesting to expand this project to include some aspect of gamification if I had the chance to in the future.
Reflection