Book Nook
01. Project Background
What is Book Nook?
Book Nook was a semester long project. We were required to design an online community, allowing us to explain the different online community design practice affordances based on our readings.
Logo credited Dushyanth Aluwihare
02. The Challenge
Understanding reader motivations
With big Competitors like Goodreads, Book Clubs, and Perusall, we wanted to find other significant ways to create an online community. What brought readers together? What are the barriers and motivations around traditional book clubs and online communities?
03. The Solution
Socialization between the lines
Book Nook aspires to be a vibrant hub bringing book lovers together through dynamic discussions, author events, and an enhanced reading experience layered with shareable annotations. Our goal was designing an engaging yet accessible platform catering to casual readers, avid bibliophiles, niche subgroups, and authors themselves.
3 types/forms of socialization:
04. Literature Review
Understanding the core principles of community design
The team identified core principles to guide the design of an online community, including promoting pro-social interactions, discouraging hate speech, enabling relevant and high-quality discussions, and facilitating strong social bonds.
Drawing on key readings, they developed 7 major principles to inform the community's feature set.
05. Competitive Analysis
Exploring the social reading landscape
To investigate this problem space, we evaluated 5 major competitors on dimensions like collaboration, design, and moderation functionality. We then benchmarked community-building features to isolate strengths and weaknesses.
06. Expert Interviews
Interviewing the Professionals
Despite gaining an initial understanding of the book reading application and book club market, our team faced a roadblock. We couldn't determine how to encourage social engagement among readers without compromising their reading experience. This knowledge gap prompted us to validate the market opportunity by conducting reader interviews to understand where and how they socially engage around reading.
Aiming to attract both casual and avid readers, we leveraged our social networks, the Ann Arbor library, and Literati, a local bookstore, to recruit interviewees. We interviewed 4 casual book readers and 3 Literati staff members, the latter providing valuable perspectives from serious readers and the retail industry.
The interviews explored reading habits, book club experiences, and pain points, with two distinct question scripts tailored for the casual and serious reader groups. Ultimately, we synthesized the interview findings with our survey data during the Affinity Mapping stage, allowing us to uncover valuable insights.
07. Survey
Testing the market potential
Once we discussed the biggest themes from our interviews, we revised and piloted our survey to test how broadly our interview themed were felt, and soft-test the market potential of this application.
We distributed the survey via reading and book club-related Subreddits, University of Michigan Slack channels, WhatsApp groups, and (most resourcefully) by printing QR code leaflets that Literati cashiers graciously placed inside book purchases during checkout.
We were able to collect approximately 53 survey responses which covered: Screening, demographic information, as well as reading and discussion habits.
08. Data Synthesis
Unpacking reader motivation and barriers
After conducting extensive qualitative and quantitative research, we affinity mapped and created journey maps to unpack reader motivations and barriers around traditional book clubs and online communities.
Key users
💡 Key Takeaways
Personal recommendations from fav authors or friends informed picking books
People follow their favorite authors, decide to read books based on recommendations from their friends and family and based on the synopsis on the back cover.
People crave social bonds.
Craving social bonds and discovering new perspectives drove book club interest, despite challenges around schedules and abrasive personalities ruining dynamics. Casual chat spaces were preferred over stuffy literary discourse by many readers.
Individuals usually don’t share reviews or join forums, but enjoy annotating.
Most participants in online book communities don’t typically share, but do enjoy reading other people’s reactions/discussions. BUT Annotations let serious readers showcase erudition while capturing passages to reinforce arguments.
09. The Approach
Consolidating a design based on takeaways
Due to time constraints, we sectioned each journey of the application, listing features that were to be included within each user action.
From the quick feature journey, we met offline to flush out our features and architecture.
And finally, a digital lo-fi was born…
10. Final Designs
Introducing Book Nook…
Explore
The homepage feed features personalized recommendations based on friends and followed authors, while spotlighting local author events. This aims to reflect the interconnected, social process of book discovery from our research.
Book Details
Each title includes an informal discussion space for readers to swap reactions. Lower stakes than rigid book clubs, these forums build bonds around beloved books. Integrated reading and annotation fosters fluid meaning-making, with comments tightly linked to passages.
Book Reader
The reader enables social annotations and text customization for personalized, multimedia consumption. We reduce friction in toggling between reading and reactions to nurture collaborative literary analysis.
Notification Feed
The notification feed allows customizable engagement with other readers' and authors’ activity. Users can follow friends, favorite authors, and notable critics directly from their profiles in order to view a personalized, curated feed of public updates.
Bookshelf
The bookshelf page offers an at-a-glance overview of purchased and saved books, while also enabling organization with helpful features.
Direct Messages
The private messaging feature enables safe one-on-one and group communication between mutual connections, facilitated only after both parties accept mutual friend requests.
Profile
Default pseudonyms empower judgment-free enjoyment and discussion of eclectic literary tastes. Badges for Top Contributors who organize events encourage incentives independent of identity.
11. Next Steps
Designing for Good
What are the next steps to designing a positive online socialization experience?
Privacy: Users should be informed about what data is being collected and how it will be used. They have the choice to be anonymous or public.
Accessibility: The app should aim to make its platform accessible to people with disabilities, through features like screen reader compatibility, alt text options, flexible font sizes, color contrast, etc. This increases inclusion.
Moderation: With social discussion features, there should be thoughtful content policies and moderation to foster constructive dialogue and prevent harassment.
Equity and inclusion: The app should avoid insensitive ad targeting or reinforcement of harmful stereotypes. Diverse representation among featured authors, moderators, influencers, etc. promotes an inclusive environment.
Balanced incentives: While incentives like badges, credits, and contributor status encourage engagement, they should not be coercive or promote unethically excessive use at the detriment of users' wellbeing.
Intellectual property: Book excerpts, quotes, and material shared on the platform should follow fair use guidelines and respect authors' copyrights. Permissions may be required.
12. Conclusion
Reflecting on constraints
Issues we faced:
Limited timeline: The project was managed through a semester timeline and milestones, so we were not able to extend to further market or late stage research.
Sample Size: Although we collected over 60 individuals for interviews and surveys, it still is just barely enough evidence to dictate our findings.