Bookora App - Buy, sell and donate your used college textbooks — UI/UX Case study

In this case study, I will explain my process of designing the Bookora App for college students.

Overview

Bookora is my first personal UI/UX project. The project idea occurred because of a need that I identified and wanted to solve. The options for college students weren’t sufficient for them to buy and sell their textbooks; also, the prices of brand new books were high. To solve the problem, what came out of that was the hypothesis that an app designed for college students would help them buy, sell and donate college textbooks.

What is Bookora?

Bookora is a platform that helps college students sell, buy and donate used textbooks locally. It was aimed at college students who found it difficult to purchase and sell textbooks. It is easy for college students to buy and sell used textbooks, pointing out that textbooks comprise a big portion of the rising cost of going to college. Also, this platform allows college students to donate their textbooks to a non-profit organization or program.

The problem

College students need an easy and cheap way to buy and sell college textbooks because college textbooks are expensive and students find it hard to sell their textbooks once their course is completed which leads to investment loss.

Design Process

Research

Secondary Research

To understand the true extent of the problem, I did secondary research. I began the process by reviewing research documents and online articles. This helped me gather insights and learn more about the problem at hand.

University Textbook Buying Experiences

• 70% of college students buy used textbooks over brand new ones
• College students at public four-year colleges spend about $1,225 a year on textbooks Which is an enormous amount spend on books. Due to the high-cost majority of college students buy used university textbooks. It's cheaper than buying new
• Other than used textbooks students also rent books and buy Ebooks available in the market. Buying used can be cheaper than renting too. The majority of students prefer used textbooks over Renting books and buying E-book.
• Most of the students buy and search used textbooks through Facebook groups and they simply start the conversation with friends and buy directly from them which is a hard task and students has to sit all day to find the textbook they wanted.

Benefits of buying used textbooks

• Most of the students will usually jot down notes in their textbooks. If your buy used textbooks, you are able to get the benefits of free notes. Students look for these notes when they search used books.
• Whenever students are buying second-hand textbooks, they are creating a path for recycling. In addition to recycling, they are able to save the lives of many trees. This is because more trees are destroyed for the paper manufacturing process.
• By using second-hand books, students are able to reduce landfill waste. Thus, therefore, availing the second-hand textbooks is one of the smart decisions you have taken

University Textbook Selling Experiences

• Many Students are earning extra money by selling their textbooks to other students who need
• Most of the students prefer to sell their books with friends at the end of the semester you can gain more profit than other ways
• There are many ways for students to sell their textbooks They can sell them in the campus store, online etc. Most of the students find it difficult to find a buyer who needs used textbooks.
• There are many ways for students to sell their textbooks They can sell them in the campus store, online etc. Most of the students find it difficult to find a buyer who needs used textbooks.
• Some students who think the money they did be getting back for their books would be so small as to make it not really worth maybe they can donate them to a non-profit organization. For instance, Books for Africa will accept college textbooks that are ‘gently used’ and of interest to African readers as part of the organization’s efforts to stop the ‘book famine in Africa.

Online User Survey

To better understand the target users and the textbook buying and selling experience of college students, I surveyed 32 students.

The following are the most relevant and useful questions, along with responses:

Survey results indicated that most of my participants either use eBook or buy textbooks from other students instead of buying a brand new textbook

Survey results indicated that the majority of our participants like to donate college textbook

Survey outcomes indicated extra than 1/2 of the participants used to sell their university textbooks to different students

User Interview

I conducted casual semi-structured user interviews with 3 people ranging from18 to 23 years old to understand the needs and frustrations existing in students current textbook buying and selling experience (Semi-Structured user interview). These interviews were conducted in a few different ways including over the phone and via WhatsApp video conference.

Semi-Structured Interview Questions

1. Tell me about yourself?
2. What does your typical day look like?
3. When do you normally first use the internet on a typical day?
4. What are some of the apps you use most?
5. How important are textbooks in your life?
6. Think about the last time you bought a textbook walk me through the entire process?
7. What are the options you seek other than buying new textbooks?
8. What do you normally do when you're done with a book after your final exam, semester…?
9. Describe the last time you struggled with buying/selling textbooks, what was that like?
10. What are the things you like and dislike in the process of buying/selling textbooks?
11. If offered a platform to buy and sell used textbooks what would be the most ideal scenario for buying/selling textbooks from the platform?
12. How would you change or improve the process of buying/selling textbooks?

Qualitative Insights

• Buyers need to know the condition of the used book before buying.
• Most students prefer used textbooks over new textbooks since used books are almost always less expensive than new books! Aside from normal wear and tear from being used by other students, there are no variations in content between a new and a used book.
• Students buy and sell used textbooks to decrease textbook waste
• Students love to donate used textbooks to non-profit organizations.
• Buyers want to know whether the seller is legitimate.
• The majority of students prefer online stores over campus stores
• Locally, students find it difficult to sell and buy used textbooks.

User quotes from the interview

“I would buy a brand new textbook but if used textbook is in good condition then I will go for used one.”

“Physical copy of book is the most important part for me.”

“Staring at a screen hurts my head, so sometimes I prefer to stare at a paper copy instead.”

“I would love to donate my textbooks to non-profitable organizations or donation programs.”

Competitive Analysis

From there, I wanted to learn more about products, that already exist in the market. To understand the scope of existing solutions, I conducted 4 competitive analysis and analyzed the features, design, pros and cons of these products.

Define

During the define stage, I put together the information I have created and gathered during the research stage. After conducting user surveys and user interviews with my participants, I then analyzed and synthesized my findings in order to define the core problems.

Affinity Map

I collected all my key findings from the user research stage and then organized all my key findings into relevant groups. This was done by creating an Affinity map where I categorized my findings into 5 broad categories: Buying habits. Selling habits, rent/eBook, frustrations, and needs. This helped me to understand my findings even more.

Affinity Map

User Persona

I was able to create 2 personas based on the affinity map I did and 3 user interviews I conducted with college students. This method empowered me to create 2 user types consisting of college students. I listed down the needs, frustrations, personalities, and preferred brands of users.

User Persona 1

User Persona 2

Problem statement

After deeply understanding the users and their problems, I came up with a few possible HOW MIGHT WE questions that appeal to users problems. There were many problems that users discussed. I am mainly focusing on important users, needs, and pain points for this project.

How Might We questions

1. How might we inspire users to donate their textbooks to NGO programs?
2. How might we create high-value communication between users and make sure there won't be any issues between them?
3. How might we help users to decide the details and quality of the textbooks before buying?
4. How might we make it quick, easy, and intuitive for users to find textbooks locally?

Ideate

After having a better understanding of who is designing for and their context. I started sketching whatever ideas came to me without judging them at this stage. After finding a few possible solutions through ideation sessions I created user stories for my product and identified the possible features that I should develop for my product.

My user stories can be accessed here. I focused on the most essential stories and shortlisted those features for my final product.

• Sign in/Sign up for users(buyers/sellers)
• Create personal profile
• Browse textbooks by categories
• Discover textbooks near you
• Recommendations
• Search for textbooks and sort by filter
• Add Wishlist
• Ratings and reviews
• Used textbook information
• Social sharing
• Donate textbook
• Donation programs listing
• Chat with buyer and seller
• Add textbooks for sell
• Products details
• Geolocation
• My profile
• Notification
• Gamification

User Flow

A user flow is a representation of the path the user follows in an app or website to complete a task. This path is divided into a series of steps that the user takes from the entry point through conversation funnels towards the final action.

I started by gathering some information about other apps flows I saw a lot of apps like OLX, eBay, Amazon, Book Scouter etc. After studying the user flow of a few apps, I got an idea of how the flow of my app works.

Here I decided to focus on 3 main flows selling, buying and donating.

Buying User Flow

Buying User Flow

Selling User Flow

Donating User Flow

Donating User Flow

Information Architecture

Now it’s time to organize and structure information so as to easily navigate through the product. Then a sitemap was created to establish the hierarchy of the content within the app. I investigated a lot of apps like OLX, eBay, Amazon etc. to get common patterns. Also, the user flows helped me in developing a sitemap for my product.

Design

Wireframing

After I had identified what features were needed and the functionality of the product. Next, I did paper sketching the app screens before starting designing in Figma. Paper sketching helps us to try out different layouts and iterations in less time

Visual design

After establishing the basic layout and user flow for the product, the next step was to create a style guide that could represent the brand’s uniqueness and presence.

Typography

I used just one typeface for Bookora, and that is Inter, which is a san serif font.

Inter UI is a free font family designed by Rasmus Andersson. Inter UI is a neat looking, clean and highly legible font family created specifically for being easy on the eyes, clear and simple to read when used on computer screens. The typeface comes in 4 weights (regular, medium, bold and black) and includes italic styles. It works great for English-language texts, and pretty well for other Latin and Cyrillic languages.

Colour Palette

Colour is a beautiful thing that creates different emotions in humans. In design, colour acts as a key function that grabs the attention of the user. Colour is the easiest aspect to remember when it comes to encountering new things for the users. The colours of the design always make a connection with the branding of the product.

I wanted my colour pallet to be simple and minimalistic. I selected fusion blue as my brand colour. The blue colour is considered to give emotions such as trust, safety and relaxation. Also, it creates emotions such as calm and makes the user feel refreshed. Also, I used neutral colours and shades as text and background colours.

High Fidelity Designs

Onboarding Screens

• Communicate the value of the app upfront through the onboarding screens. So users feel encouraged and motivated.
• I have to make onboarding easy, fast and educational
• I wanted to show the main features of the app to users.
• Visual content will have a faster impact, so I used app screens imagery to allow the user to quickly associate the features of what it does.
• Speaking in your user’s language.
• Show users progress. The user must be able to see where they are in the whole process and more importantly, how much they have left to complete the onboarding. By showing them their progress, they know they are near the end and will likely stay to complete the process.
• Give users the ability to skip steps of onboarding.
• Keep onboarding screens consistent.

Sign up process

• Allow users to sign up using their email, Facebook or Google account
• Minimize the data input from the user so that the entry barrier is low and the conversion rate is high
• Add only essential fields in the form it will save time and reduce errors better split into multiple steps
• Allow the user to see the password if he/she wishes to. I decided to provide an eye icon to show passwords
• Match the keyboard with the required text input. When inputting the mobile numbers, you can easily display the dial pad, to their input numbers and characters. This will reduce their choices and mistakes and accelerate completion.
• OTP-based sign-up using mobile numbers, which allows smooth signups
• In the next step, the user is asked for location and sign up permission.
• After this user will be successfully taken to the home page.

Home page

On the home screen of the Bookora, users will be able to see:-

• Search bar
• Filter
• browse by category of textbooks
• apply filter
• location, notification and account settings
• Image carousel to showcase donation programs available
• Nearby product listings show products available in your locality
• Recommended product listing

Search

• The use of predictable search with auto-complete can be a powerful tool to make interactions with search quick and efficient. It reduces data input. Typical users are very poor at query reformation. If they don’t get good results on the first try, later search attempts rarely succeed In fact most of them give up. When autocomplete suggestions work well, they help the user articulate better search queries.
• To make the search easier, it is important to show recent searches and popular categories. Also, nearby location searching
• After helping users input their search data as quickly, easily and accurately as possible, your goal should now be to deliver the most accurate search results in a legible and easy-to-digest fashion. The results page is a crucial piece of the search experience: it presents an opportunity to engage in a dialog that guides users’ information needs.
• One of the challenges of displaying search results is that different types of content require different layouts. Two basic layouts for content presentation are list view and grid view. I decided to go to a grid view for the search results because a grid view can be used when less product information needs to be considered when choosing between items. Grid views are frequently used for products like books because users often make their decisions based on the appearance of the product, rather than a text description.
• Show the number of search items available, so that users can make a decision on how long they want to spend looking through results.
• Users become overwhelmed when their search terms result in seemingly irrelevant results, or too many results to process. Filtering and sorting help users narrow down the data. I decided to display sorting and filtering separately because they are two distinct tasks.

Product page

The product page is important as it provides a customer with all the needed information about the particular item, allows to check various options if they exist, and also it is the spot where most decision-making on “to buy or not to buy” happens. The user can view the complete details about the product here. It includes multiple photographs, locations, reviews, product descriptions, etc.

Buyer’s Flow: How to contact seller on Bookora

• Once the user likes a product, he can click on the chat button at the bottom of the screen. The user will be brought into a private chat session with the seller.
• The buyer can only send 2 messages until the seller accepts the request of the buyer. If the seller doesn’t initiate a conversation within 24 hours, the conversation expires
• Users can see whether their chat has been seen by the seller and his/her time of reply in real-time.

There are 2 ways to make an offer for a product

• Users can make an offer by clicking the ‘make offer’ button at the bottom of the product detail page. Users should only make an immediate offer using “make offer” when they are 100% certain of your intent to purchase.
• The second way is first to clarify users doubts with the seller. Make an offer when he can follow through with the deal. Make sure users have cleared all their doubts and that both he and the seller have agreed to all terms of the transaction.

• After the seller accepts your offer, now both of them can share the meetup location by simply clicking on the location option available on the chat more option.

Leave Feedback

• After completing the deal, the user will be able to leave feedback for the seller and vice versa within 10 days.
• The users can leave feedback by tapping on the “leave feedback” button at the top. Users can rate their experience with the seller from 1–5 stars and have some comments as well.
• The positive feedbacks show that users are sincere and trustworthy buyers or sellers.

Chat Screen

• On the chat screen we have 3 chat view options at the top: All, selling, buying.
• Users can see the previous status of buying/selling either cancelled or accepted.
• By tapping on the kebab menu users can mark the product as sold or delete, chat or leave feedback.

Seller’s Flow:- How to sell used textbooks on Bookora

• Sellers flow is easy and fast in Bookaro. On the home page tap on the sell button, which stands out from the rest of now tabs
• A selling guide will appear; it shows steps to follow to complete the listing.
• Next, you will see steps to complete to list your product. There are 8 details that you need to fill in.
• Knowing how many steps are required to complete a certain operation will help the user estimate the time needed to complete the procedure.

The product listing includes title, category, photos, condition, details, descriptions, location and price.

1. Buyers usually find listings based on their titles, so users must write a good one for their listing.
2. To make your product more searchable, users must list their product in the most appropriate category.
3. Add multiple photos of the product. Textbook photos you need to add are Front view photo, Back view photo, Spine view photo, Inside view photo. Also, you need to add 15 seconds of video showing the detailed condition of the textbook this will help buyers to determine the exact condition of the textbook.
4. Next users need to decide the condition of the product.
5. Add product details
6. Decide a final textbook price
7. Enter the location area of textbook

Donating Used Textbook

Donating textbook steps

• Personal details
• Textbooks details
• Pick up address
• Schedule a slot for pick-up

Gamification

• I decided to add gamification that aims to keep users engaged so they have an incentive to donate in future.
• Some of the gamification techniques I used are badges, levels, leaderboards, points in the app.
• People like to keep track of their progress. It’s a sign of change and improvement. Progress bars are great motivators for this reason in particular, but also because we dislike incompleteness.
• A donation counter or progress bar on your detail page can motivate people to help you reach your goal.
• Incorporating social sharing into a points or levels system encourages people to reach out to their social networks, thus bringing in more interest and donations

Points

• The point system helps users measure their success. You will get points according to the number of donations.

Badges

• Badges when users reach a certain level, they can be awarded badges as a reward. This will make users feel appreciated and motivated.

Leaderboards

• The leaderboard encourages competing. Not many things can motivate users better than the desire it be the leader. “Who go more badges can increase users enthusiasm”

Notifications and Wishlist

When you click on the notification icon on the home screen, you will be brought to the notifications screen.

I utilized Wishlist’s, which enabled consumers to save products for later usage. It allows customers to quickly visit a central section of your app where they may evaluate any products they have shortlisted to consider purchasing at a later date.

Empty states

• What if the user’s cart or Wishlist is empty?
• What if there are no notifications?
• What if there are no messages in chats?

Keeping the abovementioned situations in mind, I designed empty state screens. Empty states are actually a great way to engage, keep, and delight users at critical moments.

Learnings

• Research is a critical component of the design process. It is essential to understand your users before beginning any project to ensure you are designing with them in mind.
• Designers must “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”. Sometimes we get so caught up in deadlines that we quickly try to brainstorm solutions without fully understanding the problem. Firstly, instead, we just take the time to empathize with our users so that we can design for them effectively.
• User flows are important because their focus is on the experience, and needs of the users, not the small design details on the screen. A user flow presents an overall picture and gives an opportunity to create a more seamless experience.
• Iteration is an important part of the design process. The more you design, your design improves.

Conclusion

This is the first UX/UI project I’ve worked on. This was the first app I developed from scratch; thus it was a challenging and unfamiliar experience. Personally, it was a great learning experience and I applied all the principles I learned to my first project.

Thank you for reading my Case Study! 🤝

Thank you for taking the time to read through this extensive case study. I’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions; they’d be really valuable to me. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or Instagram. 😎