Book Club Integrated Usability Improvement Design
Hundreds of thousands of books, three ways to get any one of them, and a reader who mostly wants to know which one comes next.
Woongjin Book Club opens the company's library to people who are not Woongjin ThinkBig subscribers. The same title can be bought, borrowed, or taken as part of a subscription, and several hundred thousand of them sit behind that choice. At that size the classification is not a convenience; it is the only way anyone arrives at a book at all. So the structure that was already in place was the first thing to take apart.
Buying, lending and subscribing are three different relationships with one object. Treat them as three product lines and the reader is left to reconcile them; hide the difference and it goes wrong exactly where it matters — what is kept, what goes back, and what stops when the paying stops.
Children on the service also choose a reading teacher. That is not the same kind of choice as choosing a book and it cannot be laid out as though it were: the question is trust rather than features, and the person deciding is often the parent rather than the reader.
Usability improvement across the web and tablet interfaces, including the screens where a reader keeps track of what they have.