TLCI Foundation - eLibrary
Role
UX/UI Designer
Duration
February 25, 2022 - February 28, 2022
Summary
TCLI Foundation is a black-led organization dedicated to support Nigerian immigrants with its community outreach efforts. This was the company, that me and four other teammates, were partnered with during the hack-a-thon to create a completely new look for their app within 48 hours. The challenge is to redesign a digital library, where users can borrow and return books. TCLI eLibrary improves access to books by providing different genres and categories rich in journals, literature, and books to aid reading and learning.
Problem 🤔
TCLI Foundation is in need to develop a mobile solution of the E-library that fits the TCLI standards to provide easy access for marginalized groups.
Solution 🤗
Create an E-library tailored to offer immigrant families a secure haven for accessing essential learning resources. Complementing this, we've curated a vibrant children’s book section to inspire young minds towards a joyous journey of reading.
Gamifying Reading
A challenge section designed to motivate users to read more. Users can see their progress, as well as other users.
Discover Books
A discovery section for users to find books by categories. Users can also ‘favorite’ a book they’re interested in, as well as ‘borrow’ it to read.
Children’s Profile
A children’s section that can be added to any profile. Children can select a book they want to read, play the audio, and read along with the words.
Research 📝
We started strong and hit the ground running by doing as much research as possible with the little time that we had. We decided that our findings would be best with the following research options: Competitive Audit, conduct Stakeholder Interviews, and create User Personas.
Competitive Audit
From our competitive audit, we started by looking at similar products that offered features we wanted to include in our eLibrary. We gathered information from Overdrive, Kindle Books, and Apple Books.
Stakeholder Interview
Afterwards, we decided to have an interview with the stakeholders to get a better idea of our audience. We also wanted to try and figure out what features they wanted to either redesign or include. From our interview, we learned that they wanted a higher overall retention rate, incentives for their users to read more, and better accessibility. We also gained more insight on their audience who were both from Africa and Canada. Many Users were actually Nigerian people who recently moved to Canada. This helped us move into our User Personas.
User Personas
We then looked into creating our user personas. After the data we gathered from our stakeholder review, we knew that we had to create two personas. One for an immigrant mother who had just moved to Canada, and another for a child who is also new to the country.
Research Findings
From our research, we discovered that our target audience would be for African families who recently moved to Canada to start a new life, specifically focusing on a Mother and a Child persona.
We need a way to keep users to return to the app, possibly create a way to gamify the experience and get users motivated to read.
Overall, create an easily accessible app for users to navigate. This can be from an easy way to access the library, reading a book, and even the gamifying experience.
Design 🎨
After the research part, we decided to jump into design. We started out with looking at different styles and colors that represented the main demographic of users for this app. We then looked at changing the colors and adding more ‘pop’ into the branding. After that, we combined our research and design findings into our new and improved TCLI eLibrary.
Mood board and Branding
Deliverables 📦
This was the final product that we made and presented to the panel of judges.
Outcome and Final Thoughts 🤔
After creating our final prototype, we then presented our findings and design to the panel of judges. Out of 10 other groups who also participated in the hack-a-thon, our team ended up winning 1st Place! 🎉
Final Thoughts
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: This was the first time I had to work with other designers on a project. A lot of us had different ideas and ways we gathered research. With the time constraints we had, we really had to stay focused on how we could complete this product. We succeeded by voicing our strengths and supporting one another.
Trust the Process: We were all afraid about the short amount of time we had to create a product. We didn’t even know if we should spend more time on design versus research, or vise versa. During our first meeting, we weren’t even sure if we could create a finalized product. In the end, we were able to include all the features that the organization wanted, while even adding a couple of our own.
