Design Challenge #5: Book Recommendation App

Design an AI-powered app for avid book readers

Aug 29, 2024

👋 Welcome to the Product Design Challenge: Every month, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge, you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

Scenario

You are working as a product designer at an early-stage startup called Readle, which is about book discovery. The startup has just closed its first funding round.

You are working on the first version of the Readle app, a product that helps people discover books they might enjoy.

The team is two co-founders — one with a background in data science and another with a technical product background — and a full-stack engineer.

Intro

Avid book readers often look for new book recommendations, but options are limited and very old-fashioned.

Key players in the market are Goodreads and StoryGraph. However, people find their apps quite outdated and only use them out of necessity due to a lack of better options.

The founding team has developed an AI algorithm that achieves better book recommendations than the market standard using the following inputs:

The genres you are interested in.
Your 3 favorite book authors.
The last 3 books that you read and whether you liked them or not.

Goal

The goal of this challenge is to design the end-to-end flow for the Readle app, including the following use cases:

Users can sign up for an account.
Users can fill in their onboarding information, including their favorite genres and their favorite book authors, as well as the last 3 books they read.
Users can see book recommendations and add them to their reading list or purchase them directly.
Users can mark books as read and rate them — you can decide on the rating system based on what you think works best.
Users can see AI-generated content about books, such as a summary, and tags that help people decide whether the book is right for them.

Deliverable

(Optional) Interview 1-2 people who use apps or websites to get book recommendations to identify key pain points and opportunities.
(Optional) Do some light desk research by looking at book forums and Reddit communities and seeing how people currently get their book recommendations.
(Optional) Use sketching or low-fidelity wireframing to generate a few ideas of how this flow would work.
Mock up the experience in Figma and create a rough prototype. You can use an existing UI kit or create the app from scratch.
Think of the key metrics you would want to track once the app is launched. What business metrics would be important? What product data would you want to track and why?

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. If you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community, you can share your process and output in the comment section by adding a note.