What if an application understood that it's more about the journey than the destination?
THE CHALLENGE:
Create an app that lets users connect with each other on the reading journey.
ASSUMPTIONS:
Readers want to find book recommendations.
Readers want to buy books.
Readers desire to talk about books.
MY ROLE:
UX Researcher
UX Designer
UI Designer
TOOLS USED:
Figma
InVision Freehand
Miro
01. THE BEGINNING
My team and I were given free reign to pick a problem space and identify a key pain point in that space for us to design a potential solution. From here we landed on Reading, all of us being readers.
We immediately jumped into identifying a problem space, which was Book Recommendations.
We relied mainly on interviews for our data as we entered this problem space.
These interviews revealed the big honchos of the reading world to users:
People don’t just view “buying” books as the reading journey.
People like to organically talk about books or themes in what they are reading.
Users only rely on book recommendations from trusted sources.
01.a The Persona
From these findings, we created a persona in order to empathize and understand what our users would be going through.
What does Liz need?
Liz needs a more efficient and trustworthy social reading experience, as current sites/platforms are overly cluttered and more focused on purchasing books instead of the social aspect of reading.
01.b The Design/Sketches
The design started out simple enough as I began incorporating some inspiration from various other apps/services into my sketches.
01.c The Design/Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
Before we let users enter the main home page of the app, we decided to incorporate an onboarding profile set up to allow users to enter their information to help them bind with other users. From there, they would be recommended different discussions based on their onboarding selections.
We were tackling something quite large, however as is often the case, there were other apps doing what we wanted to do. We drew from three major apps for inspiration.
The inspirations were huge factors as we began the design stage of ideation.
We knew we needed to include a dedicated feed, a means of connecting individuals, and a central hub of sorts for people to discuss their current reads.
02. REFINEMENT
02.a Adjustments
We learned much from our mid-fidelity user tests and made some adjustments as we headed into High-Fidelity.
We understood that we were creating a space for people to connect on discussions and join video calls with strangers, but who would they follow?
The question was, How to connect people?
02.b BINDING
At the backbone of BIND was the concept of binding people together for the reading journey. Being connected with other like minded readers you would want to engage with, and trust recommendations.
The hope here was to urge people to match with more specific interests, than personalities. Since we weren’t making a dating site, we wanted to focus on connecting people more with similar interests pertaining to reading, rather than personalities.
The most important thing for us when creating BIND was to keep in mind that we were ultimately helping people find their next book while enjoying their current read.
Liz doesn’t want a super linear path, as the path of discovery is part of the reading journey. There needed to be multiple paths for Liz to find her next book.
03. NEXT STEPS
If given the chance to move forward, I would like to
- Test More - We need to continue to test this design in order to make sure we are on track to solving Liz's Problem.
- Begin working on BIND 2.0. - We wanted to make BIND monetarily viable, so phase 2 involved author sponsorships, something we need to create a rich feature set in order to have early adopters.
Thank you for reading!