Kibo
A friendly and engaging experience to promote and ease the reading of non-fiction literature among teenagers via chat!
‘There is no friend as loyal as a book.’ -Ernest Hemmingway
With the ubiquity of mobile phones, most teenagers read news, books and perform 71% of their interactions via phones. While most teenagers are interested in fiction (due to the inherent engagement that it offers), even with its numerous benefits, non-fiction is often ignored.
Kibo is a chatbot that ingests books and turns them into the most engaging format of consumption of written material in our times — a conversation on a social media chat window. Book reading is transformed into engaging and interactive two-way conversations that happen between the reader and Kibo.
How might we make non-fiction literature engaging for teenagers?
With steadily declining book reading and an increase in screen time of teenagers, there opens a possibility to intervene in the activity they enjoy the most- texting/ chatting. Kibo is a chatbot that converts non-fiction books into packets of information and delivers them in the form of chats. My teammate and I traversed a long journey observing, understanding, defining, and deciding between text messages and packets of information.
UNDERSTANDING
1. What is our target users’ goal in terms of reading?
2. Evaluating the problem: Is it a common problem?
3. (Post evaluating)
Which are the competitive apps in the market?4. (Post Competitive Analysis)
How can we prioritize the activities in a way unique to the user?
1. What is our target users’ goal in terms of reading?
Our initial research online and through the library gave us insights that teenagers prefer graphical novels more than any other genre. But even within these novels, they shunned away from a linear narrative. It was always the excitement, suspense, and comedy that kept them engaged with a read.
“GenZ send and receive over 6000 text messages per month”
“GenZ has an attention span of 8 seconds. Approximately 11% of their population have ADHD”
Although anyone can make use of Kibo to ingest books in a simplified and in a conversational format, the primary target audience is children between 12–17 years of age. This is because children in this age group have the fastest growth in neural paths and have the most brain plasticity and also the highest probability of owning the first mobile phone.
Evaluating the problem: Is this a common problem?
As we observe through the charts, the highest decline in reading is faced by children who are in the age group of 12–17. There is an overall decline in reading, children who used to read started reading less and there is also an observed decrease in the hours of sustained reading.
Competition in the market
In order to understand what was beneficial and lacking in the current platforms, I had to check the prominent reading platforms today. I evaluated several features considered essential from user analysis and identified which ones Kibo could capitalize on to be ahead of other platforms.
Prioritize the activities in a way unique to the user
Plotting a list of possible features onto a graph helped me narrow down what was absolutely crucial for delivering the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Contextual Inquiry:
Being aware of the habits of the given target demographic was crucial to our understanding of the problem space. Sashank and I conducted a user survey with a set of mixed verbal and graphical questions, evaluating and interviewing 4 families with teenagers within our target demographic of 12–18-year-olds on their reading habits, preferences, and dislikes.
The above are a few ways we tried organizing information within the survey to learn the most engaging and fast-consuming format. The responses were categorized into the following:
1. Reasons for not reading
2. Reading Habits
3. Reasons for consistent reading
4. Digital interfaces in reading
5. Engaging strategies
6. Teenage ownership of mobile phones
Personas:
Design:
Designing for teenagers differ from adults in many ways:
While some approaches remain similar:
Understanding the users’ lifestyle: A product that is intended to be used regularly needs to take into account the habits and lifestyles of the users. For Kibo, we knew that the way to make it usable was to fit it into the users’ lifestyles. For this reason, we designed this ‘Fit’ taking into account other daily habits of the users.
User Flow observed was translated into information architecture:
Initial Sketches:
Low-Fidelity wireframes:
Wireflow:
Kibo has envisioned group reading rooms, the ability to share books with friends via the same platform, and the ability to create content specific to groups (marked in grey). To keep the product under the scope, these features are postponed to the second phase of the project.
Medium Fidelity Screens:
03. SOLUTION
We wanted to design a friendly and playful application that promotes and maintains engagement through an entertaining, interactive media consumption experience, leveraging the engaging experience of the existing messaging platforms for teenagers.
→ Sashank took ownership over Book Details, Custom Sharing, and analyzing design and development.
→ I took ownership of the Home Page, Library, and User Profile.
→ We both collaborated on the main chat-page and worked closely together on critiquing and fine-tuning.
Style Guide:
Challenges & Reflection
We wanted to design a friendly and engaging experience to promote and ease the reading of non-fiction literature among teenagers.
In engaging ourselves with an in-depth and well fleshed out process, Sashank and I created a seamless, quick and engaging consumption experience while providing an organized, but playful system. Not only were we able to touch upon some basic user research, we were also able to take the project to an early prototyping stage, giving us a chance to not only work in a group setting, but also across a large span of the design process.From being spoiled by being paired with a phenomenal partner, to talking to and working with users (children with unending questions), KIBO was a successful project in more ways than just a completed mobile experience.
The biggest challenge in developing Kibo is to understand how to dissect the structure of a linear book and re-organize it into a flexible narrative with loops, examples, conversations, questions, and comments. Further challenges include the extension of tree-based algorithm, feedback system for engagement, and calibrating this to a specific target audience.
