The Bookbound app serves as the ultimate book fair pocket buddy. This app enables users to host a book fair safely during the pandemic, share resources within the community, and give back to schools in a fun and intuitive way. Their goal is to re-create children’s safe-space to engage in self-discovery through reading.
This project was a submission for the 1-week Adobe x Scholastic Book Fairs Creative Jam, where my team landed 2nd place, competing against 400+ participants.
Timeframe
1 week
ROLE
UX/UI Illustrations Visual Identity
PLATFORMS
Mobile
Teams
Cindy Tan Joanna Alvarado
Building children’s self discovery through mobile engagement
How might we design a mobile tool to help scale the benefits of reading for all children?
Problem
Parents and members of the school community struggle with helping their children receive access to book-sharing events during the pandemic.
Goal
Create a mobile tool to help communities host book-sharing events safely in a pandemic and introduce or increase access to new or used books for school-age children.
Gathering Insights
Declining Impact
Pandemic caused 73% drop in book-fair earnings at the end of February 2021. Children’s literacy and media habits were shifting to electronic use.
Lack of Resources
For poor kids and underfunded schools, books fairs look very different. How can we provide a solution to not single out students or schools in this category?
Personalized Engagement
More than 75% of students allowed to select at least some of their own books, improved their reading levels.
Budgeting for Fairs
For every fair that canceled, 68% resorted to an eFair to get books in kids’ hands and allow librarians to offset budgets through fundraising.
DEFINE + ideate
Unique Guiding Principles
Kid Power
Fairs are self-guided journeys for kid’s independence, exploration and discovery.
Community
Book Fairs rally kids, families and schools together, creating more opportunities for engagement.
Giving Back
Create a virtuous cycle of hosting a book fair, giving back to schools and increasing book access to students.
PROTOTYPE
Key Solutions
01
Playful interface for customizing children’s book fair catalogue and using rewards to purchase
This playful interaction combined with rich illustrations and color, gives children the freedom to self-discover as they choose the books they want to read.
02
Easy step by step guide to managing and hosting a book fair
Condensed information makes it easier to host a book fair and relieve the stress that comes with managing a big event.
03
Access to books through community engagement
Allow members to earn rewards towards book purchases by engaging within the app. This will help low income families get equal access to books.
And...we won 2nd place!
We received news that we won 2nd place among 400+ participants across the world! The judges were impressed by our visual design, playful user experience, inclusive community and donation features.
In order to reflect a playful and welcoming identity, we utilized bold primary colors and illustrations. With the use of our established components, it made it faster to build and iterate on our digital screens.
Using illustrations to guide a journey
Just as children immerse themselves into the characters within books, I created illustrations and interactions to allow children to immerse themselves within this delightful book fair journey.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Takeaways
Process is not linear
Be flexible with how to navigate through each project process. We often times had to alternate between researching, ideating and prototyping until we were able to reach our final design solutions.
Communication
Joanna and I understood each other’s background and skills so that we were able to communicate effectively and consistently check in with each other’s progress. We were able to become a great team!
Exploring Rewards feature
If given more time, we would have liked to explore the Rewards System further to see how users from lower income families would benefit from this feature.
Future Usability Testing
It would be ideal to test the prototype and observe whether kids enjoy the virtual fairs and whether adults are able to effectively engage within the school community on the app.
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