BRAMPTON LIBRARY APP
Duration: 1 month
My Roles:
UX Designer
UX Researcher
My Responsibilities:
End-to-end Design
Research
Prototyping
OVERVIEW
Brampton Library has recently launched a mobile application which accompanies their desktop website. The mobile app allows users to browse and check out books all through their phone.
PROBLEM
While the app does give users the option to put books on hold, it does not allow users to save the books to a separate list so they can be checked out at a later time. Because of this, users can’t anticipate when their books will become available. This gives them less control over when they actually want to start the checkout process.
PHASE 1 : RESEARCH
ASSUMPTIONS
My initial assumption was that having a bookmark option would be a helpful tool for current users. Additionally, I felt that tagging books with keywords would allow the user to further organize their lists.
To validate my assumptions, I used secondary research as well as competitive analysis. For my secondary research, I looked up products like Goodreads and Libby to get a better idea of what was working/not working for them.
SURVEY
I conducted a survey to gain more information on the users’ reading habits as well as their organization habits and below were some of my takeaways. Link to survey
44% of all respondents were using Goodreads to track the books that they were currently reading.
When it came to tracking books to read in the future, only 3 of the 9 responses were using Goodreads, while 2 respondents were using their phone’s notes app and another response indicated using a Google sheets document.
When trying to find what to read next, 77% of respondents said that they used the genres of books as a deciding factor. On the other hand, 66% of respondents answered that they relied on recommendations from friends.
PHASE 2: DEFINE
PERSONA
After going over my insights, I decided to move away from using a tagging system and focus on the concept of saving books to a list. I also decided to incorporate the idea of a recommendation system so that users could “like” and “dislike” books.
After collecting my data from my research, I used the insights to create a user persona. When creating the persona, I had a difficult time differentiating between assumptions and actual user pain points. Because of this, I focused more on the user’s needs and motivations.
Creating a task flow was essential to the process as it allowed me to flesh out what I envisioned would be the step by step process for users to access the new feature.
PHASE 3: DESIGN
SKETCHES
For my sketches, I took inspiration from streaming applications like Netflix and Crave with how they displayed their media. Goodreads was also a source of inspiration for their ratings system. However instead of stars, I used the thumbs up and thumbs down option since that is less ambiguous.
For the home screen, I stayed faithful to the existing design patterns to keep things simple. This meant keeping the top navigation bar with the hamburger menu and using a carousel to show previews of book titles and the user’s bookmarks.
HIGH FIDELITY FRAMES
Since the purpose of this project was to add a feature onto an existing app, I chose to create high fidelity frames after my sketches. In the first frame, I placed the “Bookmarks” carousel underneath the “New Releases” listings. On the second and third frames I chose to display the titles in both the list and grid view and gave the user the option to toggle back and forth between the two. At the bottom of the second frame, I also added the recommendations section that would suggest books for users based on their previous selections.
The main constraint that I dealt with when designing was working within established design patterns. When working on the frames, I had to make sure that I was only adding to the screens rather than overhauling them.
PHASE 4 : TEST
USABILITY TESTING
I created a prototype and conducted a usability test to see how users navigated the application with the new bookmarks feature. Although testing was successful, I did find it challenging to manage user feedback since a lot of it was about the pre-existing design choices (ie. having the search bar too far down on the screen) or changes on the prototype (ie. using the bookmark icon to remove books from the list).
NEXT STEPS
What I learned from this project was how to work within a product’s existing design system and be mindful of existing constraints. In doing so, I was forced to take a more simplistic approach to my design since the intention was only to add onto the existing application.
In terms of next steps, I would like to implement the feedback that I received on my prototype and conduct another round of testing in order to see how the changes would impact the user when carrying out the tasks at hand. Additionally, I would build out the recommendations section further and conduct user testing to see how participants respond.