A Unique Reading Challenge
This portal is all about books and how reading good books help in the growth of an individual. This initiative gave a rare opportunity not just to work across geographies but also to build experiences connecting with young age groups. This is a challenge of its own since the perspective of different age groups and their preferences vary on what they look for and how they perceive the content.
Objectives
Make portal user friendly and intuitive
Easy to absorb the information about reading challenge
Spread the message and Motive the user
Reading is Reading….What is unique about reading here?.
The connection between readership, leadership & success is well established, world over. From a known we can get to the unknown, never the other way round. Reading books leads to Reading Self, Reading Self leads to Knowing Self (i.e. knowing our strengths, areas of improvements, happiness (what our heart wants to do) / interests, priorities etc.) and Knowing Self is the basis to Leading Self & Winning in Life!! The uniqueness comes from the fact that reading is made a ‘celebration’ here. Helping readers enjoy the content by incentivizing it to some extent. The readers are given a certain set of books covering broad spectrum of topics ranging from Environment to personality development to socio political aspects. Trying to connect all these in a nutshell without delving into detail was a challenge. As the age gets younger, giving them relevant information and keeping them riveted is an absolute challenge.
Need to think like Gen-Z
What attracts them is not a verbose text but the gist in few points and along with that, the appearance (look & feel) holds equal significance, otherwise, the time spent in trying to understand the content decreases (dwell time) and eventually without taking the gist move away from the site ( bounce time), defeating the purpose of the portal and perhaps an opportunity in educating a person. Different regions have different limitations, for the western part of the world, reading is nothing new but the eastern part has a dearth of resources in terms of books availability and exposure to the right content.
There are quite a few researches done on the thinking pattern of current generation students, their expectations, and their priorities. A deep study about their choices and preferences helped shaped the current state of the portal.
How I reached out to people
This was a tricky part, since the sampling process is spread too thin with wide demography. I started with approaching the libraries on the kind of books different age groups pick. This gave me an idea of an age-based breakdown on the choice of books. We eventually found that most of the books chosen were fiction than non-fiction. Though fiction is great, the intent of the client is to bring awareness by reading and fiction will help only as far. So, at this stage, it was well known that non-fiction was never a preference and without which bringing expected awareness is a challenge.
Next approached the bookstores with similar intent and again found that fiction got sold more than non-fiction. This stems from the fact that the price of non-fiction books is greater than paperback fiction (and also the availability of paperbacks for non-fiction is relatively less).
In doing the above…
Identified what is available and not in terms of books availability
What drove the choices/preferences
Blend old with the new
There have been Read India initiatives done before, but the broadcast was limited leading to insignificant participation. This was an opportunity to perform Gap Analysis on missed opportunities. When the old portal was analyzed critically, it violated the some fundamental principles of User Experience…
The screens were too busy
Too much contrast
Lack of user interaction due to Usability issues
Navigation issues leading to user frustration
Lost relevance and stale information
Performance issues with big images causing higher loading time
No personalization support
Cluttered information