Book exchange mobile app - Agora
Context
As I came back to France after my academic exhange semester in Seoul, we were told to put ourselves in a 6-person team to build a hypothetical start-up while considering its positive impact on the environment.
Role
We all were working together on the idea, but when it came to deliverables, I was mostly in charge of editing videos and working on the design when we made sure that we wanted a mobile app as our project.
Timeline
February - June 2023 (16 weeks)
Problem
Books remain untouched after the first reading.
As COVID-19 hit us during our senior year of high school, we did not have the opportunity to return our school books to our establishment. So we ended up with our school books gathering dust in our library. We have extended our thinking to higher education; books of medicine, law and more, which are no longer useful after the end of studies or a reorientation towards another professional and/or school field.
Solution
An accessible app to donate books and collect the ones you want!
A way to significantly reduce the waste of 26,300 tons of books...
Starting with a white paper research, we began to draw from research articles on the topic of book production, edition and their impact on the environment, when we stumbled upon quite a worrying statistic from the Syndicat national de l'édition.
"Les livres invendus et retournés chez le distributeur peuvent être pilonnés (en moyenne 26 300 tonnes de livres par an), réintégrés dans le stock (environ 10 800 tonnes), ou triés par l’éditeur (5 100 tonnes)."
The competition had no COMMUNITY aspect
After receiving lots of feedback, we agreed to add a community aspect to our mobile app. Building on the #booktok craze, the app provides a way for users to connect with each other about books. This is the feature that sets us apart the most from other apps, the other being that we emphasize the exchange between users, without using money.
Major improvements in the design
Based on feedbacks from fellow college students & our Project Road Manager (PRM), I kept doing my best to iterate the design while we were polishing our idea as a whole.
Final Design
Reflections
Do more research on color theory: As this project was asked by my engineering school, I simply chose a color adapted to our app's "values" and went to Adobe Color to find matching colors. I have been told that the chosen purple was quite too "flashy".
Do more iterations: As it is my very first experience with UX/UI design, I focused on getting to know Figma way more than actually do more designs to find the actually most suitable for our project... Time was ticking.
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