Designing A Platform To Power Non-profit Movement Of A Social Entrepreneur

We utilized a participatory approach to design a mobile app for a large pool of existing users to provide them with book summaries and spread the mission of "Make India Read"

CLIENT OVERVIEW

This mission is the dream of a TED speaker & a social entrepreneur named Amrut Deshmukh. After growing a user base of thousands of users by sharing his book summaries over WhatsApp, building a mobile app was the next obvious step. Here's Amrut's TED talk.

MY ROLE

Booklet was my first project working as an intern at BrainoidTech. I was responsible for meeting with the stakeholder, ideating his inputs and iterating over prototypes based on feedback. I closely collaborated with developers to test new versions of this application.

PROJECT DURATION

3 months & ongoing - June 2018

AWESOME TEAM

Akash with the BrainoidTech team

BACKGROUND

What is Booklet and how did it start?

Booklet – Mission Make India Read is an initiative founded by Mr. Amrut Deshmukh. He is on a mission to cultivate the habit of reading amongst the youth of India. He does this by reading a new book every week and creating a summary of it in textual and audio formats, thus the name ‘Booklet’. 

Booklet gained popularity through WhatsApp. Initially, Amrut started sharing his summaries through WhatsApp in the form of messages and audio files with every user who requested them. It's the popularity of WhatsApp in India that attracted him to it. His non-profit initiative grew so big that WhatsApp thought it was spam and blocked him. After explaining to them his purpose, they lifted his account ban. However, as our readers grew, building a mobile app with a dedicated CMS made all the sense in the world.

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RESEARCH

Design Process

Defining Product Goals

Since we were starting the app design from scratch, I wanted to make sure we had our product goals at the forefront. These product goals were challenges we would be addressing along the way. Our product goals were to:

Design An App That's Easy To Use

Earlier version of Booklet on WhatApp had various users with diverse backgrounds and ages ranging from teenagers to people in their 60s and 70s. The user interface had to be intuitive. We had to ensure that users didn't struggle to adapt to the new user interface.

Keep Users Engaged & Encouraged Over Time

While ideating the app design concept, we interviewed some users who read summaries on WhatsApp. Surprisingly, we found out that many individuals did not read the weekly summaries. When asked why they said they were not interested in that book summary or simply did not find the time to read.  We had to find ways to ensure that the users were motivated to return to the app. Otherwise, it would cost the Mission - Make India Read precious users in the long run. After all, the strength of any social cause is its supporters. 

Raise Funds For App Development

Booklet is a social start-up. We had to find innovative ways to raise funds for the app's future development. This includes development and cloud server costs. The app's founder was adamant about the fact that it would always remain free of cost. In-app advertisements were never an option as we wanted to maintain a distraction-free user experience. 

Spread & Grow The Mission

To grow, we wanted to find ways of connecting users to our mission and instilling a feeling of responsibility in them. Whether volunteering for a non-profit organization or simply donating books, we wanted to find ways to make them part of something bigger than themselves. 

IDEATION

A Participatory Approach To Design

Since this was a social entrepreneur-led mission, I thought it would be best to guide his passion for app design by using a participatory approach. I received tremendous support from him in ideating over app concepts from the start. Oftentimes, he would ping me with a new idea he had about the app which we would then bring to life.

The Familiar User Interface

Soon thousands of our users would be migrating from the WhatsApp-based Booklet to the new Booklet app. We wanted to ensure this transition is as effortless as possible without users getting deserted in the new UI. Our solution to this challenge was to design an interface that is familiar to WhatsApp. By doing so, we minimized the risk of losing out on users. 

Game Design Principles To Keep Users Encouraged

One of our key challenges was to keep users' encouraged over time. To make an attempt we decided to study and apply Gamification principles and majorly referred to the book Actionable Gamification by Yu-Kai Chow.

Introducing a Reading Progress Indicator

We decided to use a progress bar to display the user's reading progress of a booklet. This progress would be calculated using an algorithm that measures the screen scrolling speed as the user reads the summary. Further, it maps this data on a scale of 0 to 100 on a horizontal progress bar. This concept is per the core drive of Development and Accomplishment as one of the gamification principles. Below are some explorations of this progress indicator and final design.

Read More Get More Principle

This principle is born from the idea that an abundance of anything facilitates procrastination & lethargy. If we give users access to the entire Booklet library, there's a good chance that a significant number of those won't read them.

To address this issue, we decided to give users access to a booklet only when they read existing ones or parts of existing ones. We let users browse through our library and check out booklets searching them by categories or by name. But, they will be able to download it only if they're eligible for it. We represent this using an Eligibility Meter which is another form of progress indicator.

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PROTOTYPES

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NEXT STEPS

What's next for Booklet?

Several ideas are in the loop for upcoming versions of Booklet. Some of them are creating a chat experience, night mode and majorly identifying new ways of generating revenue for the cause. It's an ongoing project for me.

"All the incremental changes to the app design were out-of-the-box. The app design stands out from all other reading apps on the store. The victory of the design, made by Akash, is in the fact that the user doesn’t need a tutorial or a guide as to how to use the app. The design is intuitive and simple.

 I’m proud of the fact amongst 9000 app reviews on play store, not a single person wrote that the app is too complicated to use. That’s because de-clutter was Akash’s top priority. “Create maximum with minimum” is his motto"

- Amrut Deshmukh (The Booklet Guy)

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