Designing a concept virtual bookclub app for Waterstones*
*This project was part of a series of projects undertaken on General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive Course and thus Waterstones are not aware of nor were they part of the design process for this concept app.
I teamed up with 3 other UX designers to complete this concept mobile app within a 2 week design sprint.
The Problem:
Due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, Waterstones have spotted an opportunity to provide a virtual space for book lovers to connect. Waterstones already have a mobile app so they want to introduce functionality to the existing app that allows users to set up and manage these virtual spaces.
The main aim of this project was to provide functionality to the user to allow them to:
Create their own book clubs
Invite users
Choose a book to read
Arrange meetings
Additionally, there was the option to explore opportunities to sync a user’s reading device to the app. This feature would allow the user to see where others were in the book, and thus tracking their progress.
My Role:
As this was a group project, my role varied across the different phases of the Double Diamond. For example; I individually conducted user interviews, collected insights from the process and placed them on an online whiteboard tool known as Miro, where we collectively grouped data together to spot trends and patterns in the data. I took the lead on designing and creating the onboarding screens for the app. Each day we took it in turns to facilitate the activities for the day, allowing us to gain exposure to workshop facilitation.
The Process:
This project covered the whole end-end Double Diamond design approach. We covered many different methodologies across the various phases, including, but not limited to;
User interviewing,
User personas,
Usability tests,
Wire-framing,
Prototyping,
Affinity mapping,
Competitor analysis,
Daily stand ups
Key Learnings:
Having completed this project, there are a few takeaways that I’ve learnt during the process:
Focus on the problem: I found it really challenging to not focus on the solution because we had done so much research and already had a lot of ideas that we wanted to create.
Assumptions: I already had a misconception of how virtual book clubs operate and who might be members of one. This project really opened my eyes to the tendency to assume.
The Solution:
By the end of the 2 week design sprint we had created:
A set of onboarding screens,
A complete set of high-fidelity screens that represented the user flow,
Functionality that allowed users to set up bookclubs and vote on books for their meetings
A fully clickable prototype is available to view by clicking here.
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