People who love reading books, develop an affinity for characters and scenes and stories, and enjoy viewing or creating artwork of these characters, can currently only be entertained by these hobbies separately. iBooks Sketch would patch into the iBooks libraries of users while providing them with gallery space for projects, a community for like-minded fans, and a sketching space to create art.
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Create an app that would allow users with a wide spectrum of artistic skill to enjoy their favorite novels with the visuals of a passionate, creative community or to make themselves.
research (reading apps), surveys, interviews, sketching, wireframing, low-fidelity design, user interface, prototyping
• A professional, but not too overwhelming or extensive, sketch page that contains a wide selection of art tools.
• The ability to toggle between views of artwork and more immersive community commentary while reading.
• The ability to share your artwork, like another’s art, follow artists, and report artwork that is stolen or doesn’t fit community guidelines.
• The ability to upload a drawing or other art file from a source other than drawing it yourself in the sketch screen.
• This storage/import will function through iCloud Storage or other external storage such as Dropbox, Google Photos, or a URL from flickr, etc, and will display in a gallery.
• Maintain the framework of iBooks Library and mimic Gallery and other art additions after this branding.
An initial survey was conducted to validate the opportunity. The most important findings:
Apple’s iBooks was chosen as a parent brand for this project concept due to the following points found in research:
• Apple streamlining their devices through iCloud lends itself to easy injection into their fully functional iBooks store and libraries for users. This also benefits users who want to import and edit their image files without saving large files within books to their devices.
• Reading on digital devices continues to expand as companies release better features year after year: landscape reading, reading PDFs, annotations, global expansion of their stores, highlighting and sharing quotes.
• As opposed to some of the Kindle devices, iBooks focuses heavily on digital style instead of replicating the paper look, which is ideal for the creative who would want to see the detailed graphics of the art.
• Encourages purchases in the iBooks store, so potential KPIs for this project would include number of readers, number of books purchased, time engaged with book/art, and whether suggested or followers’ books based on data are pushing sales.
The main takeaways from the in-depth interviews were:
• Need for enough features for more experienced artists without overwhelming beginners
• Focusing on the art versus being required to participate in the community was a main point of difference
• Enjoyment of seeing other peoples’ interpretations of scenes and characters was universal
• Difference in sharing desire frequently hinged on privacy concerns or publicly versus privately sharing art.
