
A Book Club mobile app
Designed during a 10-week course at General Assembly.
Inspiration 💡
One day I was walking with a friend and she asked if we could stop by the liquor store because she was meeting up with her book club later that night. I didn’t get the connection between drinking and talking about books so I simply asked “why?”.
She had a reply similar to this:
Well, recently we haven’t been talking about the book much, so it has turned more into a night of eating and drinking. Plus, I didn’t even finish the book so I don’t want to show up empty-handed.
I wasn’t surprised a group of millennials resorted to drinking when their initial idea of a book club turned south, but I was amazed how consistent this narrative was after talking to a couple other people.
This made me think that there should be a solution out there for people to participate in legitimate book clubs that encourages insightful conversations, rather than food and drinks.
Research 🔍
To reduce risk and ensure that my idea was actually a user need, I conducted qualitative (user interviews) and quantitative (surveys) research.
User Interviews
I interviewed 6 people between the ages of 22 and 64 years old using Otter. The criteria of these recruits was that they have been a part of a book club or have at least wanted to be a part of a book club.
The key takeaways I obtained from the interviews were:
- Finding a book club is hard — 3 out of the 6 recruits have previously given up on finding a book club. All of them admitted its hard to find a club that is reading books they are interested in.
- Most insightful book conversations require a teacher/moderator — 2 of the 6 recruits reminisced their best “book club” experiences to be during an English class in high school or college. This is because students had to be prepared to discuss the book and the teacher had a supporting agenda.
Surveys
8 recruits answered 6 questions that were prepared after synthesizing some of my User Interview research.
The key takeaways I obtained from the surveys were:
- Optimal book club meeting would have 7 members — 3 recruits answered “7 members” and the average was 8.
- What book genres to include in the app — this was confirmed with online research

Competitive Research

At this point I wanted to see what other products did well. Just as important, this was where I found what they did not do well and where there were feature gaps — so I could find a competitive advantage. The first thing I did was create a Feature Matrix of all 5 of my competitors, Slack and Reddit being indirect competitors.

It was clear with this Feature Inventory that I should spend significant time seeing what Meetup did well, while correcting their shortcomings and adding features that my users wanted and Meetup did not have.

It is also important to mention that Meetup has a Comments section, but nothing to really prepare you for the event, like an Agenda area or an area to add personal notes. This epiphany would alter my Problem Statement (more on this below).
And yes, there was an emphasis on Meetup, but I still made sure to double click (rather double tap 😬) on my other competitors.

Synthesizing Research (finalizing user goals)📂
After an affinity Mapping exercise, I created the following User Persona:

Jessi is a club member, acting as the main User Persona, while a club moderator would be a secondary persona that had to be considered during design decisions.
Finalizing Problem Statement 🤝
I created an initial Problem Statement immediately after my Inspiration phase but I knew I should update it at this time because:
- There is no way after all my research that the problem statement would not be altered a little bit.
- This Problem Statement would act as my beacon during the rest of my journey, so any misinfomation could steer me off course. ⛵
With that being said, below was my finalized Problem Statement.
I suspect the problem is adult readers don’t participate in book clubs because they cannot easily find and contribute to a club that they feel is worth their time.
The great thing about this Problem Statement is that it calls attention to capturing customers (find a book club) and retaining customers (contribute to a book club).
Feature Prioritization 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣
Because we cannot have everything (especially at once), I performed a couple feature prioritization activities to determine what I would add in my MVP project.
Innovation is saying “no” to 1,000 things.
- Steve Jobs
One of those activities was the Dot Map Method, which I was able to get 11 participants for (each participant could select three features).

Search club by name was not that important to users, which made sense. After all, people looking for clubs probably do not know the name of the club. This also lead me to adding in a Sharing feature in case friends wanted to share a club with a friend via text message.
Lo-Fi Protoyping + Usability Testing 🖊
I completed 2 rounds of lo-fi prototyping, one with paper sketches:

And one with Invision’s Freehand tool, shown here (quick gif below).

Usability testing takeaways
- Confirmed overall organization
- Feature to allows users to buy the book was missing. My competitive analysis highlighted this as a cool feature but I forgot to put it in — good thing testing confirmed this was a good feature 🙃
Focus on next interaction
- More emphasis on Notes and Details layout and content
Wireframing 🖌
During this process, I created all elements (components) needed for my features and I added a couple secondary flows as well. I also started to build out my library in Figma so I could keep my components consistent throughout my blueprints and iterate fast.

Usability testing takeaways
- Users were confused upon opening the app — this meant I needed to add on-boarding to the experience
Focus on next interaction
- Create flows for edge cases so that future testers get full “experience”
Hi-Fi Protoyping 💻
I did several rounds of hi-fi prototyping and at this point were finding recruits anywhere to test my app. I added color, animation, error states, and onboarding.
Usability testing takeaways
- Most recruits got hung up when joining a book club, as they did not know what to do next — I ended up adding the below pop-up guide:

- Users wanted the ability to copy the Book Club Event address without opening an app, e.g. maybe they just want to share the address with a friend and not have to open up another app.
Final Product 🙌
You can play with my figma prototype or watch the video below, which features all my functionality in chronological order:
In addition, here is my final component library 🎨, pictured below:

If I had more time ⏰
- Conduct a contextual inquiry with Meetup asking several recruits to complete tasks such as RSVPing for an event and finding a club.
- Responsibly implement the Hooked Model by allowing users to add push notifications, and then designing these notifications.

- Add multiple ways to complete one task, e.g. allow users to quickly add personal notes from any place in the app.
- Limit number of attendees for events (per my surveys, the optimal number was 7).
- More surveys on what the Agenda section should include.
- Add more animations to improve user flow and experience.

- More usability testing on the Home page, including any valuable info that is missing from this page.
Honorable mentions🎙
In order to make this a digestible piece, I had to omit some sections. This includes:
- Information Architecture
- User Stories & User Flows
- Visual Design thinking
- Etc.
Post a comment if you have any questions and/or feedback. Email me at zlatkus.al@husky.neu.edu if you’d like to see more detail in any area of this project.