Assignment 2 ​

Application goals: ​

Name: BookClub

Intended audience: Readers and book enthusiasts

Value:

• Unlike Goodreads and other reading apps, focuses and delivers on the social/community aspect
• Encourages users to read socially and collaboratively (& thus read more)
• Enables users to easily share recommendations, thoughts, and insights with each other while/after reading

Feature ideas: ​

Discovering/recommending:

• Bookstore-inspired bookshelf (encourages browsing) to see all the books your friends are currently reading or recently read and enjoyed
• Separate public and friend average ratings for books
• Can generate lists (Spotify Blend-style) of books for friends to read together based on their shared and similar interests
• Albums/portfolios/collections of books that one person recommended to another
• Users can curate a collection of their favorite books to display on their profile
• Users can send an invitation to all their friends to start reading a book with them together

Reading daily/more:

• Daily prompt to post a photo of yourself reading
• Notification to friends when you start a reading session (activity status updated) that invites them to read with you
• Map of reading locations (cafes, parks, etc.) near you that other users enjoy going to
• Map of bookstores near you and lists of their upcoming events
• Reading challenges that enable users to earn badges and compete with their friends (Apple Watch/activity-style)
• Reading statistics/summaries (most-read author, longest book, etc.) that users can view and share with their friends (Spotify Wrapped-style)
• Shareable time capsules / memories (Apple/Google Photos-inspired) of books that you read / passages that you highlighted 1 year ago, etc.

Sharing thoughts/insights:

• Public and private reviews for books
• Public discussion threads for each chapter of a book (functions as asynchronous / non-time dependent reading groups)
• Users can see their friends’ notes/thoughts for each chapter of a book
• Reading groups (akin to Facebook groups) centered around a particular book/series/author/genre
• Users can curate a collection of their favorite quotes from books to display on their profile If you start reading a book that your friends enjoyed, those friends will be notified

VSD analysis: ​

Time: long-term health and wellbeing

• Observation: Due to the reading statistics, daily prompts/reminders to read, and gamification/badge-earning features, users may feel overly pressured to compete and keep up with their friends, reading performatively for the sake of showing off and feeling bad if they are unable to be productive enough

• Design response: To limit the downsides of the competition aspects, BookClub can also have rewards for taking breaks and achieving your own goals that you can set (as opposed to having a standard challenge for all users).

Values: value tensions

• Observation: Giving users book recommendations based primarily on their existing friends’ recommendations can lead to the formation of echo chambers; this is a tension between personalization and exploration/open mindedness.

• Design response: BookClub can have an option to also provide recommendations based on general topics and genres. In addition, some earnable badges can be rewards for reading books that none of your friends have read yet (for instance, in the form of a “trailblazer” award).

Stakeholders: indirect stakeholders

• Observation: For the map feature, the owners/maintainers of listed reading locations (café owners, park authorities, etc.) may be affected negatively by more people suddenly visiting those locations without them having a way to control their presence on the app.
• Design response: The map can feature links to information about that place’s policies, or enable owners/maintainers to “claim” the location and post their own description/hours/requests for users to see.

Stakeholders: non-targeted use

• Observation: The public book rating and review systems can enable users to give books bad ratings or comment negative things in discussion threads (thus discouraging others from discovering/reading it) due to political/external motivations (along the lines of book-banning controversies, for instance).

• Design response: It may be helpful to have a “community notes” feature (similar to Twitter’s) that can help explain why a book’s rating may be so low. Another idea could be to require users to answer a multiple-choice question about the book before they can post a rating/review, to discourage people from leaving reviews without having read the book.

Values: choose desired values

• Observation: Three of the values BookClub supports are community (reading in tandem with others, feeling part of a group), expression (listing your opinions, ratings, and favorites), and collaboration (sharing/exchanging thoughts and recommendations with friends and strangers).

• Design response: To support this and ensure that users don’t face harassment or feel unsafe, the app should have a community standards of behavior and content reporting system.

Concepts: ​

Book

• Purpose: collect information and user content related to a particular book
• OP: contains information (description and all relevant user-generated content/posts) stored about a particular book, which is displayed when a user views it

Chapter

• Purpose: enable users to see others’ thoughts about a particular chapter of a book, or a book up to a particular chapter (nothing beyond)
• OP: contains collection of user posts related to that chapter, which are sorted in order of most user upvotes

Rating

• Purpose: enable users to see others’ thoughts on an entire book after reading it
• OP: average number of stars (out of 5) that users have assigned to a particular book

Thought

• Purpose: enable users to see a quick overview of what other readers thought about a book (review) or particular chapter
• OP: written user-generated content that appear on a page about the relevant piece/section of content and are sorted in order of most upvotes

Upvote

• Purpose: enable users to decide which pieces of content should be seen by others
• OP: if a user upvotes a piece of content, it appears further up in a list. Downvoting causes it to appear further down.

Badge

• Purpose: signify a certain accomplishment to friends / other users
• OP: if a user achieves a certain goal (either standard, or one they set), they will receive an award that is displayed on their profile

Blend

• Purpose: give friends a list of books they would all probably enjoy and can read together
• OP: a list of books that two or more users have not read is generated based on their common interests (genres, books previously read, etc.)

Bookbag

• Purpose: enable users to recommend books to each other and view all the books that their friends have recommended to them when they’re finding a new book to read
• OP: users can add books to another user's collection (bookbag); a user can browse through their own bookbag and sort/group it by particular user who added the recommendation

Invitation

• Purpose: help users read books in tandem with other people
• OP: a user can post an invitation to indicate that they want to read a particular book with other people; other users can then accept the request to notify that user that they would like to read it with them

Also included but not described: user, session

Dependence diagram: ​

Concept UI sketches: ​