Go-Book

Role: Team Leader & Prototype Designer

Skills: UX Design, UX Research, Storyboarding, Wireframing, Branding, Prototyping

Timeline: January 2022 - March 2022

Team: Tina Yu, Yu Jin, Mingjin Zhang

Go-Book

One of the most common yet looked-over contributing factors of carbon emissions in the environment is printed books. There are many suggestions on the internet to help reduce the usage of printed books but the reality is that even the books that are already printed and in circulation are causing major harm to the environment. For example, e-readers are becoming more and more utilized; however, it doesn’t help with books that are currently already in circulation not to mention the resources that e-readers need for production. With books costing an average of 2-kilowatt hours of fossil fuels and 7.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide, there must be a way to reuse printed books effectively.

The Challenge:

Keeping current books in circulation is important to the environment and development, reading pre-owned books would result in less than one-fifth of the carbon emissions. To incentivize people to read and donate preowned books, we decided to find ways to simply donation process while maintaining convenience.

Problem Statement

How might we provide a quick and convenient way to motivate young professionals to donate their pre-owned books to reduce carbon emissions?

User Research

As a team, we performed 6 in-depth interviews with different young professionals to get insight into their needs and painpoints.

indicated that they hope to raise the habit of reading and believe reading is an important part of their daily life

indicated that selling/donating books is time-consuming and values convenience

indicated that they have difficulty finding platforms to donate or resell their pre-owned books

“ I have so many books that I would like to donate but I prefer to avoid donating to organizations that are not transparent with where the books go. . . ”

Personas

After conducting 6 interviews as a team, we developed two personas as a way to express different the experiences our interviewees had. Based on our research, we generated two personas. Molly, our Frugal Bookworm, is a new-grad nurse looking to find books for an affordable price. She also has a lot of books that she wants to donate. Jonathan, our Busy Environmentalist, is a single father juggling between work and personal life. He has a lot of books that he wants to donate but can’t seem to find the time to.

Persona 1: Frugal Bookworm

Persona 2: Busy Single Father

Concept Generation

To conceptualize possible solutions, we drew several storyboards, received feedback from stakeholders, and created UI sketches.

Storyboard

We decided to expand on two concepts by generating six storyboards that meet the needs and pain points of our personas. We interviewed the six interviewees once more to get their opinions of the storyboards and decided on combining two.

Feedback:

Donating books in order to get points that will allow you to buy more books was a well-received idea
Like the idea and convenience of having someone pick up old books straight from the doorstep
The transparency of where your donated books are is cool for people who care a lot about their donations

UI Sketches

To bring the storyboards to life, I created some quick sketches of what I envisioned when storyboarding.

Wireframes

We created our low-fidelity interactive prototype based on our sketches to further visualize our potential solution.

Sign Up Flow:

Shop Flow:

Donate Flow:

Profile Flow:

Feedback:

We performed user testing on our interactive lo-fi prototype.

One user mentioned that the daily check-in would not be a good enough incentive to log in every day. We decided that the check-in system was faulty and removed it in our hi-fi prototype.
Another user mentioned that the user profile has too much unnecessary information. There shouldn’t be friend features as this isn’t a socializing app. We simplified our profile screen in our hi-fi prototype.
They also asked about onboarding which we also implemented in our hi-fi prototype.

Style Guide

To begin our process of creating a style guide for our redesign, we created a mood board using keywords.

We chose the font SF Pro Rounded for our typography because SF Pro is Apple’s font line and Rounded gives the impression that our app is welcoming. We settled down our primary colors for our app based on the main colors from the images on our mood board. Here is also the evolution of our logos, our nav bar, and buttons.

Final Prototype

We created the final prototype of Go-Book on Figma. Go-Book has six main user flows:

Onboarding: get to know all of our key features
Log in and register: we moved the "skip" button from the bottom to the top right corner, so that users can skip tag selection without having to scroll to the bottom of the page. We understand how frustrating it may be for users to be forced to select tags - especially if their use case for Go-Book is primarily to donate rather than buy books
Shop: shop for Go-Book's selection of preowned books
Check out: pay for the books in your cart with various payment methods, namely our points currency!
Profile: access all of your lists including shipment information, past purchases, and past donations
Donate: donate by entering or scanning your book(s)'s ISBN

Onboarding:

Log in and register:

Shop:

Check out:

Profile:

Donate:

Reflection

Working on Go-Book was a lot of meaningful fun! We engaged in a lot of high-level design processes which gave the team additional skills. I would say that the ideation process in this project went especially well because of the care we put into it. We spent a lot of time generating ideas and creating storyboards. It proved to be very helpful since we ended up combining ideas from two different storyboards for our final solution. We also engaged in a lot of feedback with stakeholders at almost every single step of the process which helped us feel definitive about the needs and painpoints of our stakeholders and also get critiques on the user experience of Go-Book!