Book Burrow: Mobile Application

Abha Pandey
Aug 6, 2018
5 min read

User Experience Case Study | Step-by-step Design Thinking

The Seed: A friend of mine was once talking about the good old days of getting together to share and read books as a book club. He told me how his son struggles to get a good book, and how he has to buy each and every book he likes. He also mentioned when his little man received his book in pieces, and later refused to share books anymore.We got into discussions of how the book clubs stopped, and how it is almost impossible to revive them now.

That planted the seed of creating a platform for book lovers. I just needed to deep dive into the problems faced by book lovers out there.

Problem Statement

Book Clubs are rare, and a rarely functioning.
Buying books is costly.
Maintaining books is costly, time taking, and takes lots of resources.
Sharing books is scary for the condition you will receive them back.
People don’t have time for book clubs.
Finding books of your choice is difficult.
Book reading hobby, by physical book, is dying a slow death.

Goal

To create a handy solution that can bring books back to current lifestyle.
To create a platform that helps you manage your books in least amount of resources.
To decrease the cost associated to reading a book.

First Understanding

Need a handy solution.

No need for travel
No need to give specific fixed time for the activity.
Should be available anytime, anywhere.

It should be a mobile application.

Proposal

There should be a facility of Virtual Book Clubs with:

Option to create/start a book club with basic book club functionalities like join/leave requests.
An online all time available thought sharing platform where the members can discuss about topic of interest.
One or more admins to control the operations for the club. (fees, rate charts, discussion forum etc)

There should be a facility to keep track of your books, and books you have rented to check at anytime:

Books you have listed up for rental.
Status of any book associated with you. (Location, Due date, Fees associated, Earnings etc.)

There should be a system to search for a book:

By title, author name, etc.
Can be browsed without any search query. (Ex: Category wise distribution of all available books)

Design Process

There are multiple processes through which you can achieve a good User Experience product. For this project, my focus is on solving the problem. And hence, I followed the below process:

First of all we work on understanding the problem statement and analyzing it to achieve first proposed solution. Create a Storyboard (Flow of events for a generic user), and Information Architecture (referred as IA).

Then we define the users’ personas, understand the product from each of their perspective, and try to visualize their paint points and emotions while tracking their activity on the application. This way we will create a Journey map for various personas and look for opportunities in removing the pain points.

To create a MVP, we need to work on Wireframes of various screens, and create low fidelity prototypes for the same. Rapid prototyping tools like Principle helps us to understand the interaction as well as navigation of the app.

We can go back and forth between the stages and their sub-components, as needed. That is the beauty of Agile.

Some of the other pointers that can be added to the UX Design process are:

Topic Research: Dive down even deeper into the topic and try to understand why people are moving away from Book Clubs, and how can we curate to the need to keep book love alive.
Application Research: Research about existing similar applications/platforms. Analyse their IA and strong/weak points.
User Research: User research is more than gaining feedback from a set of users. It is about analyzing the behavior and patterns of system use by a large demographic by using Data Analytical reports.
Test: Usability test, User acceptance test, A/B testing; There are multiple ways to conduct a UX Design test. It is best to conduct these tests with real users, and analyzing their behavior.
Implementation: Choosing the most feasible platform, based on User research reports and implementing the designs into High Fidelity to Performance driven codes within best suited infrastructure. Support it constant study and needed upgrades, and market the product best way possible.

Generic User Story-boarding

Basic function of the app will be to browse, find, and rent a book. In this step we define this generic user flow. Based on this, we will create the Navigational Flow of the app, and decide on the first phase of screens.

Tip to implement:

Write all the screen/functionality names that pops up in your mind. Then differentiate between screens and functionalities by covering them in 2 types of boxes (Differentiate by colors if you have the resources)
Start with the most generic navigational flow, and then focus on connecting the cross functional areas. Create difference in the flows by either different colors or type of arrows.

Information Architecture

IA defines the flow of information through the application, content-wise. It can be divided in 3 major categories: Conceptual, Logical, Physical. For the starters, we will look into the Conceptual layer where we will describe what content goes where through the system.

Since the app will focus on lots of functionality around Book keeping, its content can increase exponentially. Hence, it is important to define a clear structure.

Rough architecture can be converted to clear level wise IA:

Empathize

For good UX, good CX (customer experience) is very important. To gain good CX, we need to put ourselves in the user’s shoes and empathise with them, understand their pain points, and create actionable opportunities to make our app better.

We start by categorising our users in various categories. And then we empathise to see what kind of categorisation makes more sense, and gives a better way to connect to the customers.

For the starters, I categorised based on age groups, and later based on need from the app.

It made more sense to group users based on their need to visit the app. Hence, we continue with this grouping and create a journey map to track actions, moments of truth, and emotions of an user.

Ideate

With the personas and actionable opportunities listed with us, we proceed to give shape to the application.

Wireframe

Wire-framing is a very good way to visualise your rough ideas. Simple paper and pen gets the trick done, and then the finalised version can be created using tools like Sketch.

Converting the finalised ones to clear wireframes under visual guidelines.

Visual Design

For the starters we will create this application for Android application, and use Google Material Guidelines to create the visual design.

Colours specification:

Brand colour: #F4CBFE (Light purple- Cool colour)
Base colour: #FFFFFF (White- Clear white space)

Note: This is basic visual design to showcase the idea, elements, font style, and colours of the application screen. They do not follow Material guidelines fully.

Rapid Prototyping

Designs created in Sketch can be easily imported to Principle, and a quick interactive prototype can be created.

Next Steps

As discussed earlier, the design process is not complete till now. Till now we were focusing on Strategical problem solving part of the UX Design, we still have a lot to do:

Visual Design: Following the Material guidelines closely, and creating own unique style a visual UI design for the app needs to be created which are part of deliverables to the development team.
Interaction Design: Interaction is an important part of design, it is how the application communicates to the users. Ex: Sign in button changing to waiting icon on clicking to tell the user to wait till all the info is loaded.
Test: Testing has various stages. For the starters, testing is internal with few users, where the designers and researchers note how the user is going through the application’s prototype.
Iterate: No app can be complete in single iteration, taking and implementing feedback and research data is an important part of the design process. Iteration is a continuous process, we gain new insights on human behaviour each day, and it is important to keep our app up-to-date with these details.

Hope this was informative and interesting to all of you who reached till here with me. High-five!

Do you think I missed something? Or should I change something in my process? Do suggest in the comments box.

And if you would like me to know you liked my efforts, do clap for this article. Bye!