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Prosemo
Discover and share your favorite books or explore curated recommendations
Original App Concept
Overview
As a frequent reader who is even more frequently looking for new books to read, I know how sometimes finding the right one is at best time consuming and at worst disheartening. Various social media have their own book niche communities in which they share book recommendations, but they lack their own platform for which the UX is optimized for their goals. Prosemo is a hypothetical app that makes finding books that fit anyone's taste simple and easy. It gives the avid reading community a space to share, store, and find books based on their interest.
Research
Competitive Analysis
The concept of a book recommendation app isn't new, and apps and sites like Goodreads, The StoryGraph, Likewise, and Bookfinity all empower users to find books that match their interests. An analysis of their services reveals how they complete this process and what gaps Promsemo can fill.
Capabilities
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Create personal lists
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Browse by genre
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Show trending books
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Generate recommended books
Shortcomings
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Create public lists
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No options to follow lists and curators
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Unable to create community tags
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Lack of book progress tracking
Key Insights
The majority of the shortcomings were due to a lack of ability to connect with other users. Other issues involved treating the app as a static library instead of a dynamic one where users could be leaving impacts. These issues can be solved by giving Prosemo a sort of social media type foundation where users can create their own "content," find content by other curators, and follow to continue to receive it.
Design
Information Architecture
Creating a flow chart allows me to ensure that all desired categories and options are accounted for before trying to create a layout for them.
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Once the AI was set, I then created lo-fi wireframes for the major pages. This step allowed me to begin spacing out and organizing the categories and sectioning them off in ways that were intuitive and user-friendly.
The Result
Once I had an understanding of how I was going to arrange and organize all of the elements I wanted to include, I began making high-fidelity prototype.
Browse
Find books of any group type. Explore recommended books, trending, newly added, and top collections. If you have an idea of what you're looking for, search through genres or authors.
Gather Books
When you find a book you like, you can save it independently or add it to a collection. Books can also be marked as read or in progress so you can optionally filter them out when looking for more.
Follow
After finding a collection or curator that matches your interests, you can follow them to continue getting books that have been vetted to be your liking.
Your Library
Store your books in private or public self-curated collections. Here, you'll find your saved collections made by others as well.
Refelction
When's Too Much?
I started out with the idea that this will be the be-all-do-all app for book recommendations. However, while doing research, I realized that some of the failings of competitors was that they did a lot but not well. I chose to focus on a couple of key features and flesh them out well instead of doing little for a lot.
The Social In Media
The internet has given us the ability to find like-minded individuals and share/receive content. Apps like Prosemo should take advantage of this and work with that idea to give niche community members a platform of their own.
Planning
This was a large project that took quite a bit of time. Planning was lengthy but crucial as it helped me start working from square one without being overwhelmed.