Library as e-commerce

How a more transparent borrowing experience made reading easier

Bookster is a modern online/offline library following a B2B2C model. Memberships are offered as employment benefits by the best Romanian companies.

Goals for the book borrowing page redesign:

Improve usability. Poor management of book editions resulted in unclear delivery dates for subscribers. It caused frustration and repeated support tickets.
Important feature addition: Delivery to pick-up point.Books could previously only be delivered to the subscriber’s workplace. With work-from-home on the rise, giving subscribers more flexibility is key.

My role:

Collect, summarise, and prioritise the requirements and constraints of all the teams affected by the redesign, more specifically the development team, the logistics department, and the business developers;
Design and share prototypes and ideas, get feedback early and refine the direction accordingly.
Hand off the final design and collaborate closely with the development team to ensure smooth implementation.

Exploring the good-better-best model

Good:

Better:

Best, also known as future-proof:

Advantages:

Accounting for edge cases. I often think of user experience as a funnel or a system designed to catch those who “slip through the cracks”. Happy paths are great, and they will serve a significant part of the user base just fine. But for all of those “Oh, no!” moments, it is good practice to offer solutions. → Closest pick-up point is full? Look at the neighbouring ones, you might not know how much our network has expanded! → In a hurry to borrow a chill read before you board the plane? Consider other editions or pick-up points that are part of an earlier delivery route!
A solid set-up to collect relevant data about location assessment. Granular information about every location is not only helpful for a mindful user experience, but also for efficiency down the line. Landing a new partnership with a hip cafe or local store looks great on paper, but if it doesn’t serve the library by spiking book loans or doesn’t benefit the business partner by driving readers to that establishment, it is simply a waste of time and effort on both sides.

Pushback:

Solution:

In addition to the significant improvement of the borrowing experience, edition management was another important goal for this project. Instead of refreshing the entire page when a reader switches the language, the delivery date is recalibrated and shown in real-time.

Try it!

Teams and constraints:

Logistics: revealed how the new location will be integrated into existing delivery routes and schedules, and how legacy bookshelf capacity management will affect new locations.
Business development: add and remove pick-up points, maintain the partner relations
Back-end and information architecture: new infrastructure for partner locations, capacity per location, route day assignments for accurate delivery day predictions.