Book garden
A book exchange app designed to encourage communities to pursue their hobbies of reading in a more sustinable manner.
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With a team of 6 and a short sprint of only 3 weeks, things got big — fast. From conceptualization to the final prototype, different portions were allocated to different parts of the team, and designing something cohesive proved to be challenging at times.
Creating an app to help eliminate environmental waste was uncharted territory for me, and it was a laborious yet rewarding process to venture into something I had never considered before.
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Book waste is a destructive and often overlooked result of the overconsumption of physical books. With reading being a common hobby most pursue, we aimed to create a resource that would help drastically cut down the direct, harmful impact we have on our environment as a result of our current reading habits.
Team: Sadie Clyne, Kaitlyn Campbell, Annie Bond, Max Bryan, Estefania Herrera, Tanya Munoz
Research, Ideation, Design, Copywriting, Prototyping & Testing: all team members
Tools Used: Figma, Figjam, Google Suite, Slack, Trello, Otter.ai
The Problem
There was a research study completed that concentrated on textbook recycling in America that also happened to detail the statistics of general book waste. Over 64,000 tons of books, which totals up to 320 million individual books are thrown away into landfills each year. Shocking, right? Collectively, we could all be doing a better job of getting a handle on our book consumption.
According to the New York Times, Tik Tok is one of the most influential forces in adult fiction, directly helping authors sell more than 20 million copies of printed books in 2021. As of July 2022, those numbers are still growing, up another 50% now. The hashtag “Booktok” has over 78.6 billion views, with that number growing exponentially.
The solution
We designed a mobile application that provides a communal space for readers to lend, borrow, and gift books to others locally. This yielded an alternative option for readers to expand their bookshelves in an environmentally sound way while also being easy on the wallet.
Research
After establishing a basic outline of the users we envision to use this app, we generated questions and through interviews and a survey, asked real readers about their habits and thoughts.
We discovered that most people are aggravated with long wait times at their local libraries, and would rather dish out the money to purchase a new book than wait for it to become available for free. People typically buy online and in store and shelve their books immediately after reading, even if they have zero intention of rereading them.
We created an affinity diagram and an empathy map from the notes taken during testing, and concentrated on the most notable comments to better understand our users.
“i buy books online merely for the convenience.”
“i don’t like reading digitally so i only own physical copies.”
Our persona here is the Avid Reader, who buys more than borrows despite it being a costly habit. They dislike relying on the waitlist at their local library and find that it’s worth it to pay full price for their own copy rather than a borrowed one.
They want to communicate with other people about their books and get/give recommendations , but find it difficult to connect with those people. They also think about their individual impact on the environment and feel guilty about their consumption habits, especially around paper products like books.
We kept the Avid Reader in mind throughout the duration of the project.
User Insight
The Avid Reader is easily influences and has a hard time finding immediately available books. They need a faster, fulfilling way to borrow books because their need for instant gratification causes them to overindulge and buy books they often don’t end up reading.
Problem Statement
The Avid Reader has a problem of overconsumption, and lacks an accessible way to borrow books, which feeds into their urge to buy books new off the shelf, leading to a costly and wasteful habit.
ideation
During the design process, we kept 3 key insights in mind:
Readers still want physical copies of books
Readers want alternate ways to recycle their books
Readers want to connect with others in their communities over their shared love of books
User Flow
After brainstorming, my team and I created a user flow. Avid Reader’s path starts when they decide to look for a book to borrow and they continue through the app, selecting the book they request and ending when they begin to chat about the exchange terms with the lender.
sketches
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My team and I created some rough sketches of what we wanted our app to look like before we brought them into Figma and made them Mid-Fi. We each sketched out a majority of the app, and then came together and collaboratively discussed which elements from each person’s sketches made the most sense.
Mid-fi
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We then upgraded our sketches with the iterations we made into a mid-fi prototype. We kept it all black and white and added no images or graphic elements so we could focus solely on the layout and function of the app.
USABILITY TESTING
Before beginning on the final prototype, we tested our mid-fi prototype on some users to get a sense of the flow. We tested the efficacy of 4 tasks:
Sign up for the app
Find a book to borrow
Borrow that book
Answer a borrow request from another user
Some notable results:
Our original idea of a charity contribution feature was unclear to users.
We needed more clarify on the general flow and function of the app, our users kept getting stuck in certain areas.
We also needed more definition for the process of borrowing and lending.
FINAL PROTOTYPE
When designing the hi-fi- prototype, we kept our Avid Reader in mind and took into account to comments we received from testing.
We ran one last round of usability tests after the first concept of the final prototype, and overall, our results were more successful and positive than previous rounds. Our average of successfully completed tasks rose from 91% to 96%.
Book buying is beginning to mirror fast fashion. Since TikTok and the massive growth of #booktok, so many people are going in floods to buy the newest viral book, read it once, and move on to the next. This concept for Book Garden is a great start in the right direction of cutting down book waste, but there is still a long distance to go.
In the future iterations of this project, my team and I would continue to develop and add user incentives in addition to the environmental impact statement found on the homepage. We would also continue to iterate the book exchange process, improving the user’s experience from both the lender and the borrower’s point of view. There are hopes to add some more features as well, such as a book tracking system that allows the users to create their own public digital bookshelves and share with others.