Library app

Introduction

The problem I was solving for was a need for a usable, end to end e-library application for a local school, to create an app that was both parent and kid friendly and made borrowing physical books and/or reading digital pdfs through the school library simple and easy.

The audience for this application was a school comprised of approximately 35 teachers and 150 students.

The library app’s goal was to improve the lives of my users by giving them a means to aggregate and distribute library resources electronically, whilst maintaining a level of usability and security that respected the distribution rights associated with said material.

Research

The research process I followed for this capstone involved a combination of extensive user research, including user interviews, and an extensive user research survey, competitive analysis, and finally usability testing.  The user research brief identified that the key step in bridging from white paper to a deliverable prototype involved understanding the state of the art in current library apps, and matching their ideas and solutions to our requirements brief. 

A secondary goal involved mapping how these competing solutions implemented their user and task flows around the main functions that the app was going to be built around.

To that end, these were my research questions for school admin (users) in the initial stages of the research process:

1. How does the school (users/audience) see the library app as being integrated into students’ workflows?

2. What are the categories of user for the app, and what are their roles, permissions and goals?

3. In your view, what are some key differentiators for the app over a web-based portal?

Competitive analysis shown below.

Feature Matrix

Creating a feature priority matrix helped solidify design targets for the app, rank ordered by user preferences that had been discovered in the previous research phase.

Define

Following user research and competitor analysis, I created an affinity map to distill insights from user data that could be used to create user flows and wireframes.  The affinity map procedure revealed these key features:

(1) Browsing repository (2) A curator blog (3) Dedicated shelves for users (4) A borrow/subscription timeline (5) Accessibility concerns – walkthroughs.

Features that were prioritized for prototyping included implementing a strong search/discovery mechanism, strong sorting and filtering, setting custom filters for search and sort - browsing features, and user features like creating custom lists and borrowing queues.

The affinity map is below. 

The research synthesis allowed me to define three personas, and that exercise helped sharpen the focus on user characteristics, needs and motivations in designing for this app. 

User flows

User flows focused on laying out key steps and transitions in the process of interacting with the website. These aspects of the process were examined, and they were selected relying in part on previously identified persona drivers:

•Searching for a book

•Accessing resources of various types.

•Viewing the timeline.

•Writing a book review

•Adjusting e-reader settings. 

The next phase of designing this app was in designing wireframes.  I went through 3 iterations, including 2 major iterations.  The first, low-fi, visually defined the layout and functions in the user flows; essentially constituting the skeleton upon which the prototype came to be built. 

Prototype

More than one iteration of the prototype was made, tracing the following user flows: 

1. Search 

2. Browse 

3. Timeline  

4. Borrow/View. 

Test

I conducted unmoderated usability testing to determine my audience’s degree of satisfaction with this app layout.  The following task flows were tested: 

1. Logging in. 

2. Browsing the library's resources.

3. Borrowing and viewing a book.

4. Viewing their lending history. 

A survey was the instrument by which I collected data.  More than 30 participants tested the prototype and responded to the usability survey.  Questions in the survey were constructed around the following metrics:

1. Learnability

2. Error rate

3. Memorability

4. Satisfaction

Supplementary metrics like task completion time, as a proxy for error recovery and learnability, were also asked about.  

Results showed that an average of 88% of users were able to finish (1), 100% were able to finish (2), 88% were able to finish (3), and 57% were able to finish (4) under a 10-minute reported time limit.

With respect to Learnability, 94% reported task apprehension and completion as either very easy or easy. 62.5% had no questions or concerns related to errors, and 85% were able to recover from setbacks to successfully complete the task brief. With respect to memorability, all users rated the app as very (45%) or moderately appealing.

General feedback

Users had some difficulty locating a book list customization section, and that part of the app experience probably needs to be improved. Other features, like displaying dates of return for each borrowed book, and generally enhancing the visibility of the borrow-track-return sequence may help.  The data (responses) are below.

Iterate

Testing showed that the following changes were probably necessary:

(1) Improving visibility of a book’s present status (borrowed/borrowable/time left before return).

(2) Enrich book lists and/or the user’s ability to create collections. 

Priority Iterations

Follow-up interviews showed that teachers were strongly interesting in ensuring search, content labeling and categorization, i.e. key elements of effective cataloging of library content, had high priority in the design goals for the app. I developed another feature matrix that incorporated these suggestions and could expand it into a roadmap for future development.