Neha Singh - Portfolio
 
READER
iPad, web, Mac, windows
— IA, design, interaction — 2015-16
course study
Barnes & Noble
first page
course study
A course book study app for Barnes & Noble targeting college students.
 
timeline

2014 - 2016

 
aim
Platforms: web, native Mac, iOS
I worked towards a unified design for the reading app on several platforms so that students could switch between different devices and still get a seamless reading experience.
Reader - Mac
Reader 2 - Mac
role

I was the lead UX designer.

I worked with Product as well as Research teams to understand which aspects of the reader needed to be removed, hidden or emphasized.

In each iteration of my designs, I looked for cross-platform consistency inspite of platform limitations. My main focus was to provide an experience that was uninterrupted but allowed for useful features like search, annotations, browse and library management.

wireframes and flow
ios wireframe
mac wireframe
process

My process involved deep research into education apps, several iterations of mockups and discussions with different teams, and regular user studies to see what students expect.

One of my goals while designing the interactions was to ensure that features are easy to find and unobtrusive.

To emphasize the idea of subtlety, I gave any redundant UI a secondary hierarchy and as the design lead, I ensured that the designs were simple as well as light enough that text and reading experience became the primary focus.

wireframes
challenges

Since reading digital course books was still nascent at the time, one of the bigger challenge was to mimic and, even, improve upon the reading experience in real world.

A few questions to consider were, how could students quickly highlight, take notes, zoom or move to relevant pages quickly?

I came up with several solutions that could solve each while keeping the experience uninterrupted. A few features aimed to provide the ease of physical world interactions and many took the experience a step further. For example, students could highlight, bookmark, take notes, search up meanings and definitions through a single selection. Similarly, students could type in a page number and jump to it.

This saved time, and also made experience with reading digital coursebooks stand out.

visual
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