WHAT IS BOOK NOOK?
Through an Adobe + Scholastic Book Fair design challenge, designers were tasked to create a mobile reading tool to help communities host book-sharing events, while staying safe during a pandemic.
The design challenge was targeted towards supporting underprivileged children.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
My role: Part of a 2-designer team
Both designers equally responsible for user experience and visual design
Timeline: one week as part of a design challenge
Tools: Adobe XD, FlowMapp, Google Meets, Zoom
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools and public libraries closed.
This dramatically decreased children’s access to reading, especially for those in underserved communities.
Libraries and schools closed
Resulting in a decreased access to free books
Buying books is costly
Books sold online or at bookstores are costly, limiting the amount of books children can read
Health and safety is at risk with borrowing books
Borrowing books from peers is not safe during a pandemic
INTERVIEW SETBACKS EARLY ON 😅
My partner and I discussed that it would be important and valuable to interview users from the target audience. Since we were short on time due to the one week design challenge timeline, we thought it might be most efficient if we reached out to our personal network, those who have children, or younger siblings, whose school libraries were shut down due to the pandemic.
We reached out to 5 people from our personal network, but as life happens, they were unable to schedule time for an interview within the next couple of days.
GETTING TO KNOW TAYLOR
It was unfortunate we were unable to interview anyone from the target audience in a short amount of time, but making due with what we had, we empathized with our users in another way.
Meet Taylor - What is Taylor challenged and frustrated by? What does she need? Why?
Answering these questions with my teammate allowed us to brainstorm potential solutions to solve Taylor’s problem of not having access to books.
MORE ABOUT TAYLOR
My design partner and I were beginning to understand how schools and libraries being closed during the pandemic has affected Taylor, so we wanted to gain a deeper understanding as to what might she want to gain from a mobile reading tool.
“As a user, I want to be able to checkout books for free anytime I want to, so that I can read the most books in my class, and receive a prize.”
POSSIBLE SOLUTION
A web app, monitored by parents, that encourages children to read by:
creating a virtual Book Club
allowing them to vote for the book to read
creating their own Book Party with smaller groups if they want to read a different book from the Book Club
volunteering for Story Time, a time to read to the group, while other children can also interact in the monitored group chat
TAYLOR’S HAPPY PATH TO READ MORE BOOKS!
Taylor wants to be able to browse through books and read as many as she wants to. This user flow shows the path Taylor can take to reach this goal.
Objective: Browse through and read an unlimited amount of books, anytime.
SETTING THE STAGE…
Understanding Taylor’s challenges and needs, and some of the main feature’s flows, we started sketching some ideas together.
SO, DOES IT EVEN WORK?
Although there was no time during the one week of the design challenge to incorporate usability testing, I was able to conduct testing after the design challenge was complete, for my own personal curiosity and knowledge, to test how our design worked.
Moderated remote testing was conducted with five participants. Below are key findings and design iterations:
SOLUTION AND FINAL ITERATIONS
Sign up for Story Time
Users can choose to sign up for story time. They can also chat in the moderated chat box during story time, to increase engagement with the book and other readers.
Vote for Next Book Club Read
Users can vote to choose which book should be the next book club read.
Create own Virtual Reading Group (Book Party)
If users want to read with a group, but their book of choice for the book club read was not chosen, they can create their own virtual book group.
REFLECTION & WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY
Accessibility & Inclusion
If we were to continue improving this project, I would love to add a screen reader, as well as an option to increase text size and color, and background color. These options would help better accommodate those who have various learning disabilities and visual impairments. We did not have the time to add these features during the week of the project, but accessibility options would be added to the app’s settings.
Time Constraints
Since this was a one week design challenge, my design partner and I were limited with time, and were unable to speak with anyone from the target audience firsthand. We would have wanted to interview those from the target audience, of course with parent’s permission, in order to really understand challenges young students were having when it came to reading during the COVID-19 pandemic. This would have allowed us to create a stronger design, based on real users’ feedback. However, due to time constraints, we were only able to empathize with users from second-hand research.
