How Wout Designed A Book Borrowing App For The Amsterdam Public Library In 12 weeks

In the ever-changing world of product development and growth marketing, there is one thing that guarantees success: a great user experience.

UX Design is central to everything and it’s a fact that user-friendly designs drive better conversions, adoption and revenue. This has made UX Design a highly flexible, rewarding, and in-demand career path.

💡 In fact, UX Designers were the second most in-demand roles in 2020 (Onwardsearch, 2020)

We created our UX Design Immersive Course to help people dive straight into this exciting career. To ensure students are ready for the job-market, they work on personal projects to add their UX Design portfolios. 

What they are able to achieve in as little as 12 weeks is always incredible - and here’s one of our favourites…

Oba by Wout Arets

Wout is an independent creative who decided to improve the search and reservation functionality of the Amsterdam Public Library. He was also looking to discover new opportunities that would add more value to the library-goers.

Wout's Design Challenge

People enjoy reading, but often the TV, a Netflix show, a video game, your Instagram timeline or scrolling through YouTube is an easier form of entertainment. 

Finding new books to read and getting hold of them is a process that takes too much time and energy. Wout decided to make this challenging experience a bit easier for the people of Amsterdam.

Wout's Design Process

Wout’s first step was to run an online survey to learn more about how users discover new books to read and keep track of them.  He also researched competitors and drew simple mockups of his future app. After several iterations, he built a prototype to test with real users.

Wout's UX Design Solution

Wout initially thought that searching for books to read was the main problem in the library-goers' experience.

In one-on-one interviews with users however, he was able to test his prototype and discovered that finding new books wasn't actually a problem for users at all. Instead, they were looking for a way to get their library books quickly and easily.

So, Wout changed the focus from the search function to streamlining the process of borrowing books.

To view Wout’s full project for the UX Design Immersive Courseand see how he managed to streamline the process, explore the slides below.

Interested in becoming a UX Designer like Wout?

Head on over to our UX Design course page and see if it’s right for you!