Design Challenge: Book Review App

This is a design challenge I worked on during the time period of a week. The goal of the design challenge is to build an app for people to view and submit reviews for New York Times best-selling books. 

What I did

• Basic UX research

• Persona

• Figma mockup

• MVP built in React and ExpressJS

Setting the goal and doing research

Since the goal of the design challenge is very broad, I decided to first refine the goal a bit more to give myself a clearer objective. I decided to take the perspective of the review readers for this design challenge and design an app that could provide more helpful reviews for the viewers. 

I identify myself as a casual reader. From my own experience, before I buy a book, I usually spend a few minutes looking up the ratings and reviews of the book I was going to buy online to decide if it’s worth reading. However, one problem I noticed while seeing rating scores and reading reviews on some of the popular book review sites (eg, GoodReads, Amazon) is that I usually find myself feeling lost in the reviews and left the site feeling more unsure about whether I want to spend time reading the book than before I saw the reviews. The main reason is that once I dived into the reviews, I realized that people rate books on very different standards and the reviews written alongside the ratings are not necessarily helpful for people who haven’t read the book. Sometimes low reviews would catch my eyes and I would want to read more to find out why but I find it very often for reviewers to dive into the plots, and in depth analysis on the story and writing style. While this information might be interesting to people who have already read the book to start a discussion on, for someone like me who just heard about a book and want to do some research to see if I want to read it, the reviews I saw usually left me more overwhelmed than determined.

Some examples of reviews that are not particularly helpful for someone who hasn’t read the book:

With this observation in mind, I went ahead and interviewed 4 casual readers to learn about their reading habits and experience with book reviews. The 4 people I talked with are all in their 20s, live in big cities with full time jobs. They are well-informed on popular books and try to find time to read more but usually end up reading 1-5 books per year. A few conclusions from my interviews:

• Everyone said they usually read a book when a friend or a famous person recommends it and the more people recommend a book , the more likely they end up reading it.

• The motivation for reading a book for everyone I talked to can be summarized as either to learn something new or to feel inspired.

• 2 of the people said they look at the score ratings of a book before buying and usually they look for an average score above 4 out 5 to make sure it’s worth the time but at the same time feel bad for judging a book completely based on the score. 

• 2 people mentioned that other than average score, they care more about the number of ratings/reviews which indicate who many people read this book.

• 1 person mentioned that doing research for a book online nowadays sometimes feel like a torture because there is just so much information online and she doesn’t know what to trust.

• When asked about discovering a book from a bookstore compared to online, everyone said that they prefer bookstores much more and really like when some bookstores write notes for books that they recommend.

From the summary of my very rudimentary research and my own experience, I created a persona for whom this book review app will be designed for. It will be a book review app that is recommendation based and provides a more curated, bookstore experience when viewing books and reviews. Furthermore, I want to make the review submitted for each book to be more friendly for people who haven’t read the book.

Design

With my research and refined goal in mind I went ahead and created the design of the book app. 

This is a very simple app with only 2 views, a view to see all books, and a view to see a book's detail and its reviews. The main design decision I had to make was how to show a book’s rating and reviews to make it more helpful for casual readers who are checking the reviews to decide whether to a book or not. Unlike most of the book review websites that use star ratings (i.e. GoodReads), I wanted to experiment with something more personal. Therefore I used “% of people recommend the book” as a “summarized score” for the books on this app because based on my conversations with casual readers, “someone recommended the book” is one of the most common reasons for them to start reading a book.

As for the visual of the design, I want to capture the idea of viewing staff’s notes when you visit a bookstore. Therefore, in the book reviews screen, the book information is on one side, and the reviews are shown in the format of cards on the other side on a different background color. I wanted to make the reviews to look like they are notes that’ve been taken out from an envelope.

On the other hand, for writing a review on this app, I tried to craft the questions on the review form so that the reviews can be interesting, friendly and helpful for casual readers to digest and help their decision making. The questions I put on the review form are based on what casual readers are most curious to know from people who have read the book:

1. Whether a person who read the book enjoyed it or not

2. Would a person who read the book would recommend it

3. Whether it’s an easy read or a demanding read

4. Whether it’s more entertaining or educational

I wanted to ask these questions to guide the reviewers a little bit in what they write, hoping that they will explain why they answer the above questions the way they did. While the first 2 questions are personal preferences, the last 2 give a bit more context and general feeling about the book (from the reviewer’s perspective of course), which could provide some context for readers to decide whether this is something they are in the mood for. I believe varying answers to the 4 questions above could create an interesting setup for what the reviewers have to say and I would love to test whether this assumption is true.

Working prototype

The end goal of this design challenge is to build a working prototype of my design. I went with the technologies that I’m most comfortable with: React in the frontend and ExpressJS in the backend. The prototype is made to be mobile friendly as well.

If you are interested in the code, you can check my GitHub Repository Here.