Experience design
Beyond books
To reimagine a book club and it's role within our current society. The client, Probiblio, tasked my team with creating a book club concept that moves away from the traditional format to excite and engage a Gen Z audience.
My Role
UX Designer
Duration
4 months
Tools
Figma, Figjam
To design and prototype a book club concept that engages and excites a younger generation. This concept must be dynamic and implementable in all 39 Probiblio locations across North and South Holland.
Treasure Hunt Book Club, a club that brings your book to life. A social and creative experience that rewards participants. Together with friends you overcome problems, solve riddles and engaging in a book's content on a new, more social level. This solution provides emotional connection and social engagement through interactive activities while utilising pre-existing creative spaces within libraries.
Research
Our research focused primarily around what stops the current generation from engaging with book clubs and what elements are needed in a modernized book club to attract a younger generation. Within this process my role was to execute desk research, photo studies and to plan and execute a student book club session.
Desk research
Desk research was primarily done to get an overview of the current situation. We looked at current book club concepts and how these were customized to fit the needs of participants, particularly a younger generation. I found that the format of a book club needs to be adaptable, consistent and free in organization and non-repetitive in content. The findings of our desk research helped us design our later research methods, particularly in how to structure the book club we had planned later in our research arc.
Photo studies
The reason for the choice of this method is that it provides real-life examples of environments where our target group socialises, and it allows us to get further information through the following interview. It nicely combines the option to find out the user’s motivations, feelings, and thoughts, while having the discussion points based on concrete places, which gives us the visual information (pictures) of what their favourite spots look like.
We found that social interaction and a shared experience is an important factor for users to feel comfortable and relaxed. This became a primary insight towards associating a shared experience amongst participants in our final concept.
Book club
To better understand the current state of book clubs among our target audience, we plan to recreate a mock book club experience with our peers—modifying it to focus less on a specific book and more on user interaction—so that through real-life participation, observation, and an exit questionnaire, we can uncover what works, what can be improved, and how spatial elements such as seating, decoration, lighting, and music influence engagement and overall experience.
This experiment taught us that the environment and the way interaction is designed are important factors in the overall enjoyment and engagement of participants.
Design
The full research and design reports can be found here
Ideating between the 5 team members resulted in roughly 250 ideas, which was narrowed down to a final selection of 10 ideas, which we put through a decision matrix. Each team member voted on their favourite solution based on three criteria: feasibility, engagement and fit.
After a final direction had been chose, we built a low-fi maquette of the space made available to us within the Rotterdam public library, to help imagine the way users interact with our concept within the real space. Testing with this gave us useful insights into pain points and parts of the concept that needed further refinement or consideration
As part of the sign up process, we designed an simple user flow thematic to the trial event we had envisioned. We ensured the sign-up process to be a simple and straight forward step within the user journey, as our research suggested users are less likely to sign up if they need to follow a complex set of instructions to sign up. Link to prototype
Developing a participant journey map gave us a clear understanding of what touch points still needed to be addressed. We developed interventions to help make the experience more engaging and fun. This step was vital as it gave us a clear overview of the project as a whole, allowing us to take step back and viewing the project more objectively.
Our solution envisions an experience that takes the interactive elements that Gen-Z are familiar with and applies them to modernize the format of a book club. By creating a format that is adaptable to any space, while utilizing pre-existing creative spaces, we have created a concept that is useable in all Probiblio 39 locations. A full version of our final handout to the client can be seen here.
