The Book Nook is a social media site for book enthusiasts who want a place to share recommendations, reviews, news, reading lists, host discussions and more.
Overview
'The Book Nook' was created in response to a brief to design and develop a 'storytelling' platform similar to Instagram or Facebook (amongst others).
Project Objectives
Research and establish the target audience and their habits.
Design and prototype screens according to tasks as per the brief.
Evaluate design based on design goals.
My Roles
User Research
Prototyping (Adobe XD)
Analysis
Design Goals
This online book community application aims to be the ‘one stop shop’ that readers can socially immerse themselves in the books they are reading. It can be a place where users can share recommendations, reviews, news, reading lists, lore and world speculation, tips, advice, humour and any other social interaction that a reader might like to make.
Functionality including reading lists, tracking, categorising and other book information will be part of the app to allow all information to be in one place for ease of use and convenience.
Project Objectives
Provide detailed book and author info with customizable categorization and recommendations.
Enable seamless integration with social media and external platforms for real-time sharing and connections.
Ensure user-friendly navigation, appealing design, and effective filtering/sorting for genres and categories.
Foster community building and cater to both social and private reading preferences.
Research Findings
These research findings came from some interviews with the target age group, along with academic research.
Usage
Most used platforms included: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp & YouTube.
Most of the participants classed themselves first and foremost as a consumer.
Most preferred device is the smartphone due to convenience and regular proximity.
Users interviewed were generally not heavy consumers of social media - adding some bias to findings.
Biggest Pet Peeves
Hate the 'fakeness' of social media - how people are motivated to portray a certain image of themselves online usually because they are scared of judgement..
Things are often taken out of context and information can be twisted very easily.
How addicting algorithms are, and thus how much of a time-sink social media becomes.
Millennials & Social Media
Millennials are categorized into three types: Restrained, Entertainment seeking, and Highly connected (Kilian, Hennigs, and Langner, 2012).
Social media is deeply integrated into their lives, with varied usage levels.
Gen Y primarily uses social media to socialize, stay in touch with friends, and for entertainment and information (Bolton et al., 2013).
Prototype
Screen proportions below are not standard due to allowing for scrolling.
Feedback
A summary of testing done with participants to optimise the design. Whilst a design project would usually implement this sort of feedback, this project didn't progress past this point in the design/iteration process.
Areas for Improvement
Participants noted a lack of consistency between the desktop and mobile versions.
Some icons were too ambiguous and the participants were unsure of what they meant.
On the mobile version, a participant noted that there felt like there were too many menus, and got somewhat lost in them.
It was noted that some views were a bit cluttered.
Some of the colours don't have enough contrast.
Well Received Features
The option for migration from other similar platforms (such as Goodreads).
Participants liked the layout for the most part.
The aesthetics and colour scheme was well received.
Some participants thought it was a straightforward process and made sense.
Suggestions
There were many quality of life suggestions such as minor buttons which provide helpful functionality, eg. 'forget password' or 'remember me.'
More specific filtering options eg. users, reviews.
Minor layout changes.
Simplifying the posting process eg. being able to post from anywhere in the platform rather than having to find the correct page first.
References
Kilian, T, Hennigs, N & Langner, S 2012, ‘Do Millennials read books or blogs? Introducing a media usage typology of the internet generation’, The Journal of consumer marketing, vol. 29, no. 2, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Santa Barbara, pp. 114–124.
Bolton, RN, Parasuraman, A, Hoefnagels, A, Migchels, N, Kabadayi, S, Gruber, T, Komarova Loureiro, Y & Solnet, D 2013, ‘Understanding Generation Y and their use of social media: a review and research agenda’, International journal of service industry management, vol. 24, no. 3, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 245–267.