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UX Design Team:

David Sainté

Rina Kim

Melissa Frank

Our Hypothesis

Why are books being thrown out in the street?

 

Could be it because people like reading books but don’t know what to do with them once they’re done? If so, how can we help them find a way for these books to be reused?

Discover & Define

We interviewed people from within our network. People who own and read books fit into this target group. Here is our demographic breakdown.  We wanted to gather as much information as possible about their reading habits, how our interviewees acquired books and what happen to those books after they finished reading them.

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WHAT DID WE HEAR FROM OUR USERS?

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Affinity Map:

Once all the interview were gathered we broke down all of information gathered and looked for patterns in our users habits and thoughts.

Pressure with Borrowing:

“It’s awkward to ask for books back.”

Social Validation:

“When someone recommends a book to me, it’s like a nod of acknowledgement… I’d want this to happen more.”

Price Conscious:

“I swapped with another student for a French 101 book, it felt really good and we both saved a lot of money.”

Discovery:

“I like giving them away and getting new ones.”

“I like to browse and discover something new.”

Social Motivation:

“I want my friends to read so we can talk about why the book was so crazy!”

Preserve knowledge:

“I don’t want to throw knowledge away in the trash.”

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From key quotes from our users, we pulled very important insights that we translated into solutions. We then also narrowed the traits of our user down to a single universal Persona.

Persona

Gwen

Age: 29

Gender: Female

Income: Middle class

Location: NYC

Occupation: Marketing

Behaviors

  • Trusts her friends for recommendations

  • Loves sharing and engaging

  • Acquires secondhand books or from Amazon

Goals

  • Read 1 book a month

  • Learn new subject matters

  • Save money

Frustrations

  • Dislikes the risk of others failing to return loaned books

  • High retail cost of books

Scenario: Angela has a ton of books she wants to share and would like to swap them with new ones that her friends just read and recommends.

REDEFINED PROBLEM STATEMENT

Readers are inclined to share what they have recently read with their friends because of the excitement books can bring. Angela loans and gifts out her books as part of her sharing process, but would like it if this was reciprocated as she feels there is so much value and worth in receiving a book in return. How can we facilitate a platform where books can be traded with friends?

Design Studio

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We conducted a design studio, then decided the actual layout and features based on the solutions we found in the research phase. Then we whiteboarded our wireframes after we decided what key elements we wanted for the application and how they would be displayed in the application.

Ideate, Build & Test

Once we conceptualized the designs in Sketch we created a clickable mid-fidelity prototype using InVision. Then we conducted two rounds of usability testing, improving on our design with insights from the previous round of testing.

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