Overview
Marcus is a smart bookmark inspired from the traditional bookmarking methods, a multi purpose product which can be a bibliophile’s true companion.
A bookman always loves his books, admires them, share his thoughts about his readings with others. Books are still very popular in our digital world, it’s nice and comfy to lay in bed and read and feel a book. People prefer reading print books and consider them as assets. While reading they mark text and use bookmarks but they can’t carry them or recall them every time, especially when they want to discuss about their readings or thoughts.
Marcus aims to give the bibliophiles a world which they long for, where they can share their thoughts and books within their community.
Role & Process
The project was a part of my product analysis module at National Institute of Design. It took 3 weeks to come up with the final product. As a UX designer, I identified the need of such a solution for the book readers and designed the product keeping in mind their traditional reading behaviour. I followed a double diamond design process here.
01 Research
The research methodology I followed includes primary research as well as secondary research which helped in coming up with potential insights for designing a new product for the book readers.
Through the secondary research I tried understanding the importance and relevance of reading printed books over e-books. I also analysed the features of other similar products through which I came to know about the market trends, to estimate initial goals for my product.
The Primary research I did included interviews of 20 bibliophiles of different age groups, the aim of this research was to understand the behaviour of book readers.
Key findings
02 Experience strategy
02.1 Defining persona
To understand the requirements and goals of the stakeholders, I created user persona based on my primary research data.
02.2 Defining requirements
To have a more focused approach for designing Marcus, I listed down the major requirements as per the user goals and expectations.
02.3 Defining product attributes
With the help of product attributes I was able outline the outstanding capabilities of Marcus, which makes it more valuable and useful than the other similar products in the market.
02.4 Application map
After determining how the key tasks would flow, I began organising the app's content and features. Due to the limited time I just focused on three features of the app - profile, library and saved text collection.
03 Interaction design
Wireframing and testing
Working step-by-step, I created wireframes for (1) Creating an account, (2) The marked text collection (3) Library of the books read (a) by user, (b) by user's friend, for requesting and lending books and (4) User's dashboard. Using Invision, I created a mid-fidelity interactive prototype of the wireframes. Testing sessions revealed areas that needed improvement. Based on feedback from user testing, I further iterated and improved my wireframes. A few of them are shown below
04 UI design
However the main focus of the project was product designing, I just gave an overview of the app required with the product. For this I worked on creating a brand identity and then the application UI.
Branding
Colour palette
Buttons and tabs
Text hierarchy
The app uses Avenir Next font in dark grey and gradient colour as its title, body and button text.
Avenir Next design has excellent readability because of its optical construction which lents it a more humane appearance.
Icons
These icons are endowed with abstract meanings, so I have used hollow icons for easy recognition and faster selection.
The App
I worked on screen transitions and interactions to make it more intuitive and user friendly. Marcus gives the user a library of the books available to read within the community. It helps the user save their important quotes or highlights from the books they read. It also lets them interact and share thoughts or books with their friends or members of the Marcus community.
The app prototype here just gives an overview of Marcus phone application.
App Login
User can easily login by creating a new account or preferably through his Facebook account to easily build his own community of bibliophiles amongst friends.
Share and chat
User can see all his marked texts with book name and author name. They can select any of them and choose to share or delete. Green markers indicates the markers already in discussion.
Share and borrow books
User can see the books being read within his community and he can select amongst the available one and suggest them to some friend or borrow them to read.
Profile settings
User is able to view and edit his profile as well as he can get a complete account of the books he has borrowed, lent and also the recommendations.
05 Conceptual product proposal
Getting inspiration form the usual reading habits and gestures of book readers, I started iterating the product and came up with an intuitive and simple design for Marcus. Here are a few initial iterations which led to the final product, which is easy to clip the the book and allow page turning while reading, it is in sync with the Marcus app and helps in higjlighting text as well as acts as a lamp.
Scenarios
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