Bookmarkers is an app that allows people to increase their comprehension of what they read through discussion live meetings and discussion boards. The concept was made for people who often have busy lives or have their lives to be "on the go."
A concept of the mobile app on the phone. A Live Session discussion is happening on the screen.
Problem Statement
Those with limited time, who seek to improve their professional growth through the use of books, book clubs, and book club discussions to increase the comprehension of what they read, find it difficult to stay engaged with a traditional book club when time is a limiting factor.
User Insight Statement
Tony, a new entrepreneur, and CEO with limited time need to quickly acquire and master comprehension of information related to his industry to ensure the success of his business. During the interviews, we discovered that a majority of individuals who seek book clubs do so with the main purpose of finding a group of like-minded individuals that share their same interests, with whom they can discuss the material they read.
Therefore, we believe that people with limited time who seek to join a book club would benefit from an app that would allow them to partake in a virtual book club that fosters the meaningful discussions they seek to increase their comprehension of what they read related to the interests.
User Persona
Tony the Entrepreneur
Research
Our main goal in the research is to interview 4 to 5 people in order to discover what reasons people have for seeking out book clubs & discussion boards, understand their point of view about the features that are most important to them within a virtual book club, and analyze factors that would increase traffic to the app.
As we broken up our 5 interviewees' answers, shown above. As per our objectives of: learning about our users reasons to seek out book clubs and discussion boards, to determine what features would interest them the most for a virtual book club, and lastly, how can we increase traffic to our app for our stakeholders.
We broke them up by the medium they use for books, seeing that they are broken up into 3 different groups, Audio, Digital, and Physical. Audiobooks are becoming more commonplace now since people don't seem to have enough time in their day to sit down and read a physical or digital copy of the book. After that, we focused on the more social reasons for joining a book club, we noticed people want to be a part of a book club because they want to explore, share the experiences they, themselves have experienced with the book.
We tested to see if having the author press meetings or have them interject into club meetings would interest them. Most of our users said yes it would because they're interested in the creator's thought process when they made the book. To see what nuances they have originally made and then compare it to the readers' opinions.
We also noticed that our users would love structure given to them such as scheduled meetings and assigned reading.
Categorization of Answers
We looked at our competition, seeing mobile apps like Booksloth, Byzan and even Our Own Book Club. We noticed that each mobile app is aimed at a specific targets in the reader's world. Booksloth is aimed at people who primarily read Young Adult (YA) genre. Byzans is more international as there are users from multiple languages who use the app. For the last example, Our Own Book Club is more so of a management and library app that works as an communication system. However, Booksloth doesn't have a dark mode version, Byzans doesn't have a matching function so users may not be able to find others who have read or is reading the same book. Our Own Book Club does not give control to their users to set up meetings, everything is predetermined and hard to modify.
Competitor Analysis
Value Proposition
With all the flaws our competitors would be based in, we created this book club to focus on communication and comprehension at every member's choice. With no defined location, all the user needs is wireless connection and their phone to follow along on any conversations and chip in if they want, allowing them to understand their book more or to have insight in a different way that they never thought of.
User Flow
We created this process from a pure mobile app function, aiming towards the primary functions of book clubs and also providing a boarding process for our users. As you can see, we created the flow from downloading the app, having the onboarding process for our users to entice them to use our app. From that point, the user makes their account and then provides the simple options of joining a book club and all of its features.
Prototype
Low/Mid Fidelity
Splash Screen
Coaching Screen
Login
This is the base of the Onboarding Process for our Users, as you can see from the low fidelity design is basic. We added the alternate sign-in function for our users so they can just easily make an account with either of those options.
Draft Features
This set shows how easy we created the interaction to join the club. In essence, you click on the book club, read the description and then you click "Join Club." It gives the user the notification, letting them know that they joined the club and they have the option of staying on the "Find a Book Club" section or immediately go to "My Clubs."
When the user gets into their book club, one of the things they can do is written responses, where the club leader can title the discussion. It can be about a certain chapter, topics, whatever they may choose as the topic.
These are the other features of being in a club. You can read the assigned reading or the book that is part of the club in its own tab. Alongside that, you can see who else is in the book club with the user to show how many people there are and to be able to put a name to a face or icon that other users want to use for their profiles. Along that end, a more interactive element and what I think is the main purpose of getting the app is to have a live audio/video function where members can talk to each other in real time. With the thought that a lot of readers are introverts and might feel uncomfortable speaking or for users who don't want to practice their public-speaking, they have the option to chat to the group in order to be part of the conversation.
User Testing
With the lo-fi prototype, we made it into a solid clickable.
We had 3 tasks for our users to complete. The first task is to find a book club and join it. The second task is create a book club and the last one is post a note in a discussion. What we noticed from our users were to implement 5 changes to improve the layout and their quality of life. The first one is to have our signup button to be more different than the other sign-in processes. Our navigation buttons should be bigger, an early user stated that they should be able to go to their clubs immediately after creating it. The fourth one is to simplify the form for creating a book club. Lastly users pointed out that there isn't any pages to manage clubs. All of these insights that our users made, we continue to improve them through the period.
The Final Concept
Adding color and background for our app
Showing the gallery of books the user can join book clubs for
Revamped Login screen
Iterations
Process of changes and implementation of users testing
1. To reduce the clutter buttons we presented the sign up option as a question to the user.
2. To make the home screen more inviting, we made larger tiles for navigation.
3. We were unsure where to send the user after joining or creating a book club so we added an option for the user
4. Things to add:
Genres (radio buttons)
Books/publications (search bar with filter and add book to club button)
Popular or sponsored books
Schedule (calendar)
Private (yes or no checkbox)
5. We decided that options to manage your clubs should be available on the app.
Ending Statements
Through this process, I have thought about what would be something new for our users. I was thinking about a book I was reading at the time: Dune. Rarely do I get to talk to people about books and I mentioned it to my group members that we could create a book club app concept. They agreed that we create one. Not knowing much about the book club app market, all I knew personally was Goodreads.com which is more so of a library/forum for book readers that have a collection of things such as quotes from the books. I come to learn that many people do enjoy reading books but the issue is that they don't seem to have the time to such as one of my own group members when I was telling her stories from the books I've read.
For future thoughts, we had thought about allowing users to have their own libraries in the app, which allows users to buy or rent books from our bookstore so they can join a club for a book they don't have. Another idea that should be implemented for the future would be having a function for authors to join in their and have sponsored statements so multiple book clubs could be in the same space as the author. However this project was completed by a group of 2 and me in a time span of 3 weeks, we have used Miro, Figma, Zoom, and Google Suite as our primary tools to work throughout this process.
Happy Readings, Mark your Page
