DeBooks
application concept & high-fidelity prototype
Design Problem
There is currently no platform that enables DePaul students to compare the prices of textbooks from a variety of sources at once. This frequently forces students to choose between convenience and cost. For while low cost textbooks exist, they are often difficult to locate and often require shipping. The student population also lacks a means of exchanging/selling textbooks to one another.
Role: User Experience Designer
- Interactive Design and Prototyping
- ISM 220 at DePaul University
- Autumn 2016
Process
User Study
After targeting the inefficiency of the bookstore as a possible problem, the design team interviewed students across the university and observed the campus bookstore. From these interviews and observations we then developed insights.
These images depict our insight development process. First sharing our observations (right), then categorizing them to insights, and lastly the requirements we developed from our insights (bottom).
Concept Exploration
From these insights and requirements, we developed principles for our design, which facilitated our concepts and the generation of user stories, storyboard and interface sketches. Shown left is an interface sketch I created for a messaging feature that was deemed unnecessary after user testing and not present in the high fidelity prototype.
Low Fidelity Prototype & User Testing
From our user stories and storyboards, we then constructed a site map to begin to create a structure for DeBooks and to better visualize our task flow. It is from this task flow that the team was able to develop a low-fidelity prototype, task scenarios and conduct user testing. (part of the book info task flow are shown below)
Solution
High Fidelity Prototype
Through user testing we were able to pinpoint the strengths and more importantly the weakness of our design. The weaknesses included unnecessary features, unclear labels and confusing task flows. With this feedback in mind, we then built our high fidelity prototype in Axure (link). The final product DeBooks is our solution to the inconvenient and untimely current textbook system at DePaul University.
