Final Project: LIT+ (UX)
When I was at 5th grade I received an award for being the student who took more books from the school library. I loved to read and I used to spent hours and hours with my head inside a book, specially if it was Harry Potter, but for some reason I stoped doing this for many years. Ok, but why am I sharing all this with you?
For my final project at Ironhack I received the following challenge: to apply everything I've learned so far creating a digital product in two weeks. It could be an app or a responsive website, as long as it was something we were passionate about. Since recently I rediscovered my passion for reading and was constantly asking myself why it took me so long to make my way back to the books, I decided to study the reading habits of young people in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
I started my research not knowing what I was going to find or which way I was going to follow, so I went big. I started with an online survey who gave me a sample of 215 people, being most of them female with the age of 25–35 who had the habit of reading (meaning they read at least one book in the last three months).
(Interesting fact: from the people who said they don't have the habit of reading, more than 90% said they would like to read more. And from those 45 people, more than 70% said it only lacks the initiative, which means they know they have the time and they know they could do it, but they simply don't start.)
From the list of reasons people said that motivates them to read, pleasure is the common ground to all the publics, but "occupying my time in a positive way" is directly linked to the 25–35 age range, while "studying" appears more between the 18–24 age responses.
While the survey was still receiving answers, I started to do a few interviews and dug a little deeper inside the mind of my public. I talked to the person who inspired me to read more, the owner of an Instagram account who is dedicated to literature, some heavy readers and some young people who don't read at all and the result was incredible.
What amazed me the most was the fact that every heavy user I talked to had a break at some point at their reading routines and had recently recovered this habit, just like me. So I tried to understand this better, and below you can see some of the things they've said, and a few insights I had along the way:
- Usually people stop reading after a big break at their routines such as the beginning of college, and social media arrived for many of my young adult public while they were about to enter college or while they were there, such as the arrival of smartphones, which potentiated the use of those platforms. So after leaving college, the time they used to spend reading, they were now consuming this type of content basically every time they had a break;
- Seeing their own progress as a reader is the key factor to keep them motivated;
- Usually frequency is more important than quantity of pages read. Is better to read for five minutes at a day than not read at all. They know sometimes their routines don't allow them to read more, and that's ok;
- And finally: all of them rediscovered their passion for reading after a moment of self knowledge, when they were trying to find a better way to spend their time.
Finishing the interviews, the next step was to analise all of the data I had, so I started to write it down and created an Affinity Diagram that helped me visualize all of the content better and identify some of my users pain points. That also helped me a lot while creating my Empathy Map. And since I didn't know which way I was going to follow yet, I created one for a non reader and one for a reader to help me see things more clearly and identify opportunities.
From all the information I gathered, I created three different personas:
- The urban girl who stopped reading when she entered college and started to read again recently on her way to work from home and vice versa. What makes her happier is to see that last year she only read one book and this year she's reading from 1 to 2 books per month;
- The guy who stopped reading for not knowing what he was going to read next, and found recently through Instagram a community to call his own with people who have similar preferences than his and can now share experiences and tips on what to read;
- The college student who says she don't have time to read, but knows she have but for being tired from college all the time prefers to spend it on social media and watching series on Netflix.
When it was time to create the User Journeys, I preferred to do it for Camila analysing how it was her day before she started her process of reading and another one for after she got her habit back. It helped me see opportunities more clearly moving forward.
After all of it was done, I could identify that the best way to fulfil the needs of my user was to create an app who would follow their reading journey. So it was time to see what was already on the market and to do a business and competitive analysis. I had four main analysis I had to make:
- Skoob: the only brazilian reading platform on the market. It's actually a website who also have an app, but the website is currently more payed attention than the app. Although it has a lot of features inside the community part, most people use only to trade books and registry the books they are reading.
- Goodreads: an app developed by Amazon who only a few people I've talked to know about. It's used more for registry of the books they are reading and to get suggestions for next readings.
- Bookly: nobody I've talked to knew about this app since it's not from here, but it was a really great reference for the way they follow the readers progress.
- Instagram: for my surprise, during the survey when I've asked where people went to look for suggestions on what to read next, "Literary Instagram Account" showed up on second place with 33,5% of the answers, only losing for friends suggestions. So I went to dug a little deeper and I was amazed to see how there is a whole community of readers inside Instagram with profiles dedicated only to that, going from 2–3k followers to more than 100k! And what was more interesting to see was the high level of engagement, being from followers more passives that only gets tips and informations about books, or being from very active followers who participates on the comments section and live stories daily. Those followers even create groups on WhatsApp to talk more about books and create challenges on the Stories section to engage more.
Click here to read the UI process of this project.
