What is the Book Project?¶
Currently, it's a book tracker. It lets users track books they would like to read, are currently reading, have read and did not finish (we call these 'shelves', and we also have user-defined shelves). At present, users have to enter the information by hand.
Manually entering in information is tedious. We're also curating a catalogue of books to search from (the 'Books API'). It'll be hard to create a sizeable quality library of books to choose from, so we still want users to have the option to add in a book if it doesn't exist in our catalogue. Over time, hopefully, users will use this feature less and less as the size of our catalogue grows, but this feature will likely stay.
Where is it heading?¶
In the short term, we want to publish our web app to real users as soon as possible. This will allow us to find out what works and what doesn't. Crucially, we want to keep our users at the heart of what we do, so new features will largely be dictated by what our users want (as well as trying to meet unarticulated but desired needs!).
Ultimately, we want to expand from being a book tracker to being a book platform. Users will see what their friends are reading and connect with like-minded individuals to form reading groups. Moreover, there is a lot of scope: we could create mobile apps, a recommendation algorithm for recommending books, etc.
For more information, have a look at our vision document.
Why design is important to us¶
One of the primary reasons for starting the project was to address the concerns users had with Goodreads's outdated design. We want to create a clean, modern and simple design that our users love. Partially, this is UI, but this is also UX. Our web app needs to be intuitive and satisfy the demands of our users.
We don't see UI/UX design as a one-off project. Rather, it's a continuous process to improve our web app.
From a development perspective, quite a lot! Take a look on GitHub.
Design team¶
We also have a small UI/UX team that researches how we can create a compelling user experience for our users.
| Name | UI or UX? | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Braja | UI | Mockups |
| Reza | UX | |
| Margo | UX | |
| Sriram | UX | |
| Diana | UX | |
| Danni | UI | Mockups |
Alumni:
- Olivia: designed our logo and worked on our mockups
- Elena was a UX researcher
- Iris: UX researcher
What has been done so far¶
See here for the mockups we are designing for our second version. Please note that these mockups are an early draft. We are still working on them and things may change substantially.
Our third version will then incorporate our UX research.
We have recently formed a small UI/UX team, so it's still early days. We're currently conducting competitive analysis, defining our goals and our success metrics.
Commitment¶
We're all volunteers that work on this in addition to our day jobs/university work/other commitments. There isn't a company; we're only a group of people looking to build an incredible product. We don't make any money whatsoever, and none of us gets paid. This means that we won't be able to pay you. Open source is well established in the software development world, and we hope that you'll be able to get something out of it.
In terms of commitment, you're free to put in as little or as much time as you'd like. Equally, if you decide that this isn't for you, you're more than happy to leave at any time. Given that this is voluntary, we avoid imposing any deadlines. All we ask for in return is to keep us updated on what you are working on. If a task is taking longer than expected for whatever reason, that's fine, but please do let us know.
Interested in joining?¶
Reach out to @knjk04 on our Slack workspace