oBible
A Daily Bible Reading App
20% of Christians read the bible daily — 60% want to read it more.
oBible is designed to help you achieve your daily bible reading goal with custom reading plans and automatic reminders.
Beginning with interviewing “real users” about their biggest frustrations keeping up a daily bible reading habit gave the basis of the features required for a successful design.
oBible features Daily Bible Reading Plans
It’s easy to create a goal — from reading the entire bible in a year, or reading a specific book in just one week.
oBible features Smart Reading Reminders
You pick the best time for your daily bible reading, and we’ll notify you when it’s time. We’ll also remind you if you snooze or miss a daily reading, or need to finish your reading before the end of the day.
Designing to User Needs
There are already great bible reading apps out there, but there didn’t seem to be a simple read and study bible app with all the basics you need to support a daily bible reading habit or custom weekly schedule.
In the beginning it was hard to know where to start.
However, performing user interviews ensured oBible’s simplistic design met the needs and goals of real world bible readers with a narrow focus.
Mike, Goal: Bible Study
Mike has been a regular bible reader for all his life. He was raised Christian. With his wife and two young children, he attend a nondenominational church about an hour from where they live.
Mike uses online bible reading plans, and prefers a popular app for reading and tracking his progress. He reads any translation, and reads from an app on his phone. He reports that when he fails to do his daily reading it’s most often from a change in his schedule, otherwise he’s pretty much every morning before work. He doesn’t have any reminders set, it’s just habit.
In his reading he stops at a verse “you must be perfect” and notes he’d like to know better what it means by “perfect” there, but doesn’t have a way to research it right now, and thinks he’s unlikely to get around to it later. He also makes highlights of verses he likes or would like to refer to again later.
Mike says he’s probably read the bible every day of the year. He’s completed many plans, and has read a variety of translations through ‘cover-to-cover’ but has no record of his reading history and achievements.
Design Opportunity: Mike would benefit from a reading interface which reminds him to read if his missed his usual time. It would also feature inline cross reference and original language dictionary / concordance features.
Courtney, Goal: Bible Reading
Courtney admits she’s never really read the whole bible by herself, “despite being a lifelong Catholic”. She’s interested in reading it all the way through, and she says she likes the idea of reading the bible daily, but says she doesn’t have clue as how to get started on either of those goals.
For her bible reading she shows me a printout from her church’s weekly sermon and demonstrates reading the noted scriptures from the pristine pages of an NIV bible. She sets aside the sermon sheet.
Courtney says she’s just joined a weekly bible study group at work but that there is no reading schedule. All she knows is that they will be studying Galatians for the next several weeks.
Design Opportunity: Courtney would benefit from technology prompting a daily reading habit and could use a guided schedule, and book or topic specific reading plans.
Conclusion
Over time the design evolved to it’s leanest UX, stripping back to the barest necessities to accomplish the user’s goals—daily bible reading, and study.
#IXDonline #UCSD #CogSci #InteractionDesign
