Challenge:

Bhuku is a book inventory app that was inspired by goodreads.com. They’ve been collecting data on popular books, and hired you to give the app a more user-centric approach, adding features and flows that make it delightful for people to use.

Objectives:

• Design a mobile app for Bhuku that is user-friendly and delightful to use

• Create a brand for that aligns with Bhuku's values

Bhuku is a book inventory app that was inspired by goodreads.com, an American book cataloguing website and app. To grasp the current state of Bhuku’s market, online research began with an in-depth look at the goodreads’ user demographic, alongside its user engagement patterns.

Predictably, I found that the app’s users primarily consisted of US residents (45.56%) with a strong correlation between education levels and readership (44% of goodreads’ readers had completed college education).

Surprisingly however, I found that the main source of user engagement with the service stems from users actively keeping track of their reading progress in order to fulfill their reading resolutions. In fact, Bookly quotes that “reading trackers” were the number one reason that Americans stay on board with their reading resolutions.

Indeed, a glance at some of Bhuku’s competitors - goodreads, Libib, Library Thing, Litsy, and Kindle - found that while the different apps each had their own unique approach to book cataloguing (some apps emphasize on barcode scanning and others provide a instagram-esque tag system), all of the apps offered highly customizable libraries for users to maintain.

Diving deeper into finding the needs of potential users, I went onto Discord and Slack channels, and found 5 individuals within the Bhuku’s market demographic to further our previous assumptions and validate the secondary research findings.

During the interviews, I asked open ended questions to gain more knowledge about how my participants went about finding, selecting, and reading their novels/novellas; I questioned their process in defining a criteria, their motivators to read, and honed in on how they engage with physical or electronic books.

Once I began seeing significant trends and patterns (over the course of five user interviews), I began to map out interview transcripts with the audio and video recordings I took. These led to the creation of an empathy map that I used to dissect the information from the User interviews, and view them at an atomic level.

Before I began the Interaction Design portion of my process, I first needed clear and concise definitions of the Business and User goals, along with prominent technical considerations that may come into play. These goals will establish a criteria of what my design will accomplish, what features I must incorporate into the design, and a priority list of which features are the most important, and those that are not necessarily needed.

Having defined the various user and business goals, I further filtered my list of features with these goals as the criterion.

The features were then reorganized into a priority-based list in accordance with the following metrics: user goals, business goals, effort level (needed to create the feature), and confidence level (how much assurance I had in creating the feature).

In the final iteration of the feature list, it showcases a list of high-priority features necessary to solve the problem and conform to the criteria, along with the middling and low priority features that can be incorporated given enough time and budget.

With the layout of the app revised and finalized, I began work on Bhuku’s branding and UI. First I created a mind map of Bhuku’s brand, to come up with a set of adjectives that could help guide the branding process.

After I came up with the adjectives, I began to build an inspirational mood board for the brand’s Colour, Typography, Posters, Logos, and Imagery. These gave me the ideas I needed to start sketching my logo, and picking the colours and fonts. Eventually compiling into the Style Tile below.

After the Style Tile was compiled, I applied the style throughout the prototype to create the high fidelity version of Bhuku’s app.

Refinements into the UI of the design finally brought my UI Kit, which was a living document that constantly changed with every iteration of the site, closure. The finalized colours, typography, and style were rearranged into their atomic and molecular forms, and put together in a cohesive document.

The next step would be to formally hand off the assets to the client or developer. This would be followed by continued testing of the design updates since the last usability testing, update the UI Kit, and continuously cycle through iterations and testing for as long as resources allow.