This week marks the end of our group project, as we finalised a few things, from transcribing the interviews, to creating user personas and then making a new improved flow for our proposed app, Libby.
I had a lot of fun during this particular project maybe since I am an existing user of Libby and it’s always nice to improve something that I’m using. However, it is also interesting to see my other team members who are new users and explore the app, as they may be able to spot things and come up with good insights that I may miss.
As a whole, we mainly focused on users who are interested in viewing and browsing books, and heavily zoomed into their browsing experience. We touched on two main user profiles, one who leisurely reads and is open to discovering books from different genres and the other a knowledge reader, who has specific titles, genres, or formats when searching for books.
I personally think we made the discoverability of the genre section and the way readers find books much more easier than the previous design, however, perhaps we could have looked at a much different angle. During our presentation, we were asked a particular question which made me rethink our whole design process.
“Why didn’t we focus on the section where the user is currently reading?”
And this stumps us because I thought it was very clear cut where we can access our current reads --in our “Shelf” tab. But perhaps it isn’t and it was just an assumption. Thus, we didn’t try to find out if what the reader need is just a simple icon to tap in the homepage section to go straight to their current read.
Also, as an existing reader, I would know where to tap to go straight into the book I’m reading-- which is the circular icon on the tab bar below. However, I can understand that it may not be intuitive for new users; or existing users may not even know of this feature and continuously use the “Shelf” tab to access their current reads.
We did not rethink the experience of viewing the e-reader as we find the interface very straightforward. However, for readers to navigate to the e-reader, perhaps we could design a different way to present this? Thus, I thought of apps we utilise every day and how they manage to depict shortcut navigation routes for users’ ease. Music and video apps came to mind as they have direct navigation for users to tap into the songs/videos currently playing.
I thought perhaps we can sort of emulate the same thing and this is what I came up with:
We could perhaps do a “Now Reading” strip where it’s clearly visible for readers to tap and go into their current read instead of a circular icon with just an image of the book cover (like the previous design) as it will be more intuitive and it mimics what people are accustomed to.
What I have learnt
I think feedback is really important. In any phase of the design process, it is the key driver to work towards any improvement or refinement. Thus, I find the presentation feedback really valuable as it will spur the group to improve and reiterate on our current designs.
