ROLE: LEAD UX&UI DESIGNER (RESEARCH, INTERACTION DESIGN, VISUAL DESIGN)
CLIENT: BHUKU
TIMELINE: 80 HOURS OVER 4 WEEKS

PROJECT DETAILS

CLIENT  |  BHUKU
ROLE  |  LEAD UX & UI DESIGNER (RESEARCH, INTERACTION & VISUAL DESIGNER)
TOOLS USED:

• Research: Secondary Research, Industry Research, Competitive Analysis, Provisional Persona, Interviews, Observation.

• Synthesis: Empathy Map, User Persona, Pencil & Paper.

• Product Strategy & Ideation: POV Statements & HMW Questions, Brainstorming, User & Business Goals, Product Roadmap, Site Map.

• Interaction Design & Testing: Low, Mid and High Fidelity Wireframes, Pencil & Paper, User Flow, Task Flow, Prototype, User Testing, UI Kit, Sketch App and InVision.

THE CHALLENGE

Design a mobile app and branding for Bhuku with a highlighted feature.

THE OUTCOME

A mobile app, logo, brand and highlighted feature based off of empathy, research and testing.

BACKGROUND

Bhuku is an app for book lovers that will help users track everything they own, books they have read, what they will read next, and also everything they have loved so far. In essence, it’s quite similar to goodreads.com.

Bhuku has started collecting data on popular books. Inspired by goodreads.com, Bhuku wants to give a more user-centric approach to their app, adding features and flows that make it delightful for people to use. They want to use the full potential that a mobile app has, such as utilizing the camera to register books in a more automated way via optical character recognition (OCR), sending notifications to users to keep them engaged and tracking their progress on reads.

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

MARKET & INDUSTRY RESEARCH

I began this project with secondary industry research of market trends and a competitive analysis. This helped me understand Bhuku's position in the book tracking space. I learned that a big part of users still prefer printed books, but e-books and audio books have been gaining traction and popularity. Through my research I discovered that 65% of Americans have read a print book in the last year, more than double the share that has read an e-book (28%) and more than four times the share that has consumed book content via audio book (14%). Now, even though print remains at the center of the book-reading landscape as a whole, there has been a distinct shift in the e-book landscape over the last five years. Americans increasingly turn to multipurpose devices such as smartphones and tablet computers – rather than dedicated e-readers – when they engage with e-book content. Bhuku’s app would be able to be used to search for any book, whether print, e-book or audiobook, for a total book tracking experience, but with a special concentration on e-books.

Threats and Challenges

• Audiobooks - Nearly one-in-five Americans now listen to audiobooks

• Printed books - Printed books are still considerably more than twice as big as the market for ebooks

• Largely in the self-published sector, are ebook only, so one can't compare with print sales, and one can't
get the stats in any case, one can only estimate them from things like charts

• Libraries, tv, radio, newspapers, magazines

• Traditional Publishers

Opportunities

• Biggest two brackets for e-books: 34% - 18-29 years old, 31% - 30-49 years old

• By 2022 the the number of e-book users is expected to amount to 621.8m

• From 2011 to 2018, e-book revenue has grown from 2.31 to 8.69 billion dollars.

• Men and women are equally likely to read digital-format books such as e-books and audio books.

You can find the summary of my secondary research including the competitive analysis here.

PROVISIONAL PERSONAS

Guided by my secondary research, I based each persona around behavioral patterns for millennials. These provisional personas helped bring focus to my contextual inquiry questions and allowed me to have a good starting point for testing my assumptions.

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY

Informed by my secondary research, I developed a list of questions and an interview guide to structure my contextual inquiry. My interview guide went through basic questions asking people about their experience with e-books. 

You can find my interview guide here.

ASSUMPTION I HOPED TO TO VALIDATE OR DISPROVE:

• Majority of customers use an online book service, versus an E-reader.

• Users want to share books that they read with others.

• Users use online book services the most at specific times during the day and night.

• Users want to save E-books that they have already read.

• The main customer focus of online book services, is getting new book recommendations.

SYNTHESIS & DEFINING

UNCOVERING INSIGHTS & IDENTIFYING NEEDS

After completing the interviews, I created an empathy map to synthesize the information gathered during my contextual inquiry. I looked for patterns, similarities, and contrasts in order to uncover insights from my observations and move towards identifying user needs.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Users don’t want to sift through e-books they aren’t interested in.

• Users seem unhappy with the lack of information for e-books.

• User don’t like going to multiple websites to look for e-books.

PRIMARY USER PERSONA

The information I gained from the primary user persona that came from my research helped me to better understand the users goals, needs, motivations and pains.

POV & HMW

After establishing my primary user persona, I took Kim's insights and needs and translated them into Point of View Statements, then from those, crafted How Might We questions for each one. 

BRAINSTORMING & IDEATION

I conducted a digital brainstorming session for each How Might We question. I gave myself two 3 minute rounds for each question and typed out as many ideas as I could think of. This was a great way to generate ideas quickly, giving me lots of options to review.

PROJECT STRATEGY

For the next step of the defining process, I used a venn diagram to map out the overlaps of the business and user goals, and technical considerations. 

PRODUCT ROADMAP

Keeping the project goals in focus, I created a product roadmap that featured three of the mutual goals from the venn diagram and placed them in order of priority in terms of development, and importance to business and user goals. The roadmap also includes proposed metrics for measurement so the effectiveness of the features can be tracked and analyzed.

SITEMAP

I created a site map to show the pages that make up Bhuku’s app and where the highlighted feature would be on the app.

INTERACTION DESIGN

USER PROCESS

With my sitemap in place, I moved towards the prototyping process. First I created a user flow, showing an example of how a user would come across the feature in the Bhuku app and how they would navigate through it. Then I created a task flow, showing how the task would be completed. Mapping out the flow helped me to think through each step and make sure the process flowed in a smooth manner.

USER FLOW:

TASK FLOW:

UI REQUIREMENTS

Referencing my site map and flows, I created a detailed list of interface elements for each of the pages. This UI requirements document served as a checklist for me as I began wireframing. You can view the UI requirements document here.

WIREFRAMING

I created low wireframe sketches of Bhuku’s mobile app and the highlighted feature. I referenced the UI requirements document and sitemap to make sure I included priority elements for each page.

MID FIDELITY WIREFRAMES:

HIGH FIDELITY WIREFRAMES:

USABILITY TESTING

USABILITY TESTING PLAN

I developed a user testing plan to outline the task objectives, goals and procedures.

You can see the full testing plan here.

AFFINITY MAP

This affinity map was used to compile all the data from the user tests. I placed the data into three columns: success, patterns and comments. Then I compiled them altogether and listed the insights and recommendations based on the insights.

UI DESIGN

MOOD BOARD

To gather inspiration, I created a mood board based on attributes I gathered from Bhuku's mission. This helped to narrow the direction of the design.  

STYLE TILE

After using the mood board to narrow down the direction of the design, I created a style tile to keep the look and branding consistent across all pages. Along with designing the style tile I also created a logo for the Bhuku brief. The new logo is BUKUBOOKS, playing on the meaning of the word, BUKU, meaning many or a lot and putting it together with BOOKS, was a playful way to say many books, and for a book mobile app, that’s a great thing!

HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

Using InVision, I uploaded all the high fidelity wireframes and created a prototype showing a limited preview of the favorite features functionality and flow.

You can view and interact with the prototype here.

UI KIT

After the wireframes were completed I collected all the UI elements and placed them into a document to serve as a reference guide for anyone who works on the feature for Buku's mobile app.

PROJECT TAKEAWAYS

I was presented with a brief with the task of creating a book tracking mobile app, along with it’s logo and branding. After doing my research and conducting contextual inquiries I found that users consume books in different forms, like audiobooks and ebooks and of course, paper books. I also found that people want to find books they like without having to sift through books they aren’t interested in. After defining the information further and brainstorming I created a product roadmap that led me to a filter feature. This feature would allow users to view only the genres they like without spending time sifting. This would give users a more efficient way to find books that they like along with a positive user experience with the design of the app and it’s functionality.

NEXT STEPS

In the next steps I would want to continue the process of proving or disproving my assumptions. Through this process so far, I was able to disprove that users want to share books that they read with others. Through my research I found that this isn’t a popular priority or goal among users. It would be my goal to continue refining the user experience through this process.