Valter - A Library App - Ux/Ui Design
Introduction
A fictional case based on true statistics where the Swedish public libraries suffer from a lack of usage. Everyone seems to want them to exist and they do provide access to knowledge, but just a few actually visit them. Here I will explore what creative and necessary measures you could take in order to make the most out of libraries.
My role
I spent a lot of time in the ideation stage to really find a solution to the public libraries’ challenges, doing user interviews and low-fidelity prototypes. I also did the wire-framing, visual design, as well as high-fidelity prototype that we showed the client.
Quick Overview of the Project
The Swedish public libraries are available for everyone and offer a large variety of activities and knowledge for free. Yet barely anyone use their services and expertise and the libraries echo emptily.
Almost no young adults visit them. There’s a lack of knowledge about what libraries have to offer. Libraries don’t communicate what they have to offer through social media and websites. There are overall negative associations towards libraries…
Valter could be described as something similar to Wikipedia or Google but on Valter, there will only be information and sources that are supported by research and controlled by librarians.
Situation
The Swedish public libraries are available for everyone and offer a large variety of activities and knowledge for free. Yet barely anyone use their services and expertise and the libraries echo emptily. They are especially lacking young adults that mostly use the internet to find the information they are looking for.
Brief
How can Swedish public libraries attract young adults and innovate themselves for future generations?
Process
We began to use our own experiences to summarize what a library is and concluded that almost all of our interpretations were negative, such as “boring”, “sterile” and “irrelevant”.
Libraries have looked the same since the dawn of time with 4 walls and some bookshelves. They lack innovation and don’t try to innovate like the rest of the world.
Now we needed to know if others also looked at libraries the same way as we did and localize pain points.
We interviewed 20 different people around the ages 16-35 about their thoughts on libraries and we found out that:
Almost no young adults visit them. There’s a lack of knowledge about what libraries have to offer. Libraries don’t communicate what they have to offer through social media and websites. There are overall negative associations towards libraries based on previous experiences such as being forced to go there during school.
One thing we noticed was that the people we spoke to had a hard time imagining what a library could be instead of what it is today. Therefore we made a prototype we called The X Company, where we included every service today’s libraries have but under a more neutral name.
During our second round of interviews, we introduced The X Company as this new service that offers everything from seminars and lectures to physical books and the interviewees became more open to new ideas.
We also noticed that the environment was not important to the user at all when visiting a library. So the idea of rearranging the furniture and or making it look more modern would just be a waste of time and money.
The solution
Based on many interviews, research, and testing we concluded that the future of Swedish public libraries is digital, at least partiality in the beginning. Hence we created Valter, the next generation of libraries. A digital knowledge bank whose sole purpose is to encourage learning and make knowledge easy and accessible for everyone. Valter works as an extension of today’s libraries in the digital landscape.
Valter could be described as something similar to Wikipedia or Google but at Valter, there will only be information and sources that are supported by research and controlled by librarians. While on other search engines people can publish whatever without any credibility or reliance.
Valter’s strengths are the quality of the content, the time the user saves when only needing one service, and categorization based on subjects making everything easy to overview.
We understand that the original physical libraries still fill a function and needs, so in the early phase of Valter, they will still be available as usual until the new service has gained trust, stability, and a good amount of content.
