Jagharlast.se

Jagharlast.se & LegiLexi

The website jagharlast.se was created to give teachers and students a shared platform to increase leisure reading and especially encourage students to read for pleasure during school breaks.

On jagharlast.se, students can today write and submit book reviews and take on holiday challenges.

Jagharlast.se is run by the non-profit foundation LegiLexi.

Prototype

Hi-Fi prototype

The design was based on the existing design system, but I made some adjustments and added new components to improve the user experience.

Book review flow Hi-Fi

Landing page Hi-Fi

Discovery

Background

The current users of jagharlast.se consist mainly of students at schools that also use LegiLexi's tools to track student reading development, and the number of users is growing steadily each year. This suggests potential for usage of jagharlast.se to also increase. The site has not been updated for several years, which has resulted in outdated design and poor functionality and usability.

Scope

Students can both write book reviews and complete holiday challenges on jagharlast.se. After the research work, the book review flow was prioritized as it is more strongly connected to the purpose & goal of jagharlast.se and it was the flow that caused the most pain points.

Research Goals

To understand what motivates elementary school students to read and write book reviews & understand what obstacles they encounter on jagharlast.se book review today.

Interviews & Survey

I conducted 3 user interviews and sent out a survey to 76 teachers and parents of elementary school students who use jagharlast.se and answered questions about what motivates students to read and write book reviews.

Four themes that crystallized related to writing book reviews

Insights

I found four themes related to writing book reviews on jagharlast.se where the first theme "see results" was the one mentioned most frequently.

1. See results
2. Competition & rewards
3. Show & share
4. Right level

Heuristic Evaluation, Usability Testing & Behavior Analysis with Heatmaps

I conducted a heuristic evaluation to quickly identify potential problems in user experience, conducted usability testing with an elementary school student, and analyzed behavior based on heatmaps that I compiled into a user journey.

User journey based on insights from research

Insights

The majority of pain points occurred in the "writing phase"

• Not being able to step back one step at a time
• Difficult to search for and find the right book
• Getting no help to correct errors (for example, a required field that was left blank)
• Some questions are phrased with overly complicated words
• Difficult to get an overview of your book review
• Unsatisfactory and unclear feedback when the review was submitted

Prioritization and Ideation

Workshop

After collecting data and insights from users, it was necessary for me to prioritize and develop technically feasible solutions. To achieve this, I facilitated an ideation workshop with product owners, project managers and developers, where we started from How Might We questions formulated based on the insights and problems that emerged during the research phase.

Workshop Results

The solution proposals that were voted on by the participants were prioritized in a high-impact/low-effort matrix, the proposals that ended up in the 1st quadrant could I take to the sketchboard.

Genius bumps rubbed in the workshop

Solution proposals in an effort/impact matrix

Sketch & Design

Hand-drawn sketches and wireframes

I am a strong advocate of hand sketches, I think it's an easy way to test ideas where there is less risk of getting stuck in details. In this project, I first made many quick hand sketches and then drew up wireframes in Figma with regular feedback loops.

Quick hand sketches on student side and review flow

Wireframes on student side and book review flow

Insights & Learnings

Scope & Prioritization

You often want to do a lot, and it easily becomes too much. My entry point in the project was to "redesign the entire site" which was also the initial description from the client, but I realized that it became a bit too broad and too big for the limited time I had. It resulted in me taking a bit too big a grip from the beginning when I should have done many user tests instead. It therefore helped to limit myself and focus on the flow for writing book reviews.

Get more perspectives

It was incredibly rewarding to get more perspectives and suggestions for solutions from both the project management side and developers to gain an understanding of what is technically and economically feasible.

Test more often

Design must always be iterated to improve for the end user. I wish I had had time to test with more users to verify my design.