The approach

We utilized the Double Diamond framework to maintain a holistic view of the project. By balancing divergent and convergent thinking, we systematically narrowed down the core problem while minimizing bias. This approach ensured our final solution was both deeply researched and highly effective.

Product Discovery

After receiving a big challenge about reading habits, we started to break down the problem into smaller pieces, focusing on the readers’ experience when reading new materials.

User Interviews

Before doing any user interviews, we started first and foremost the important activity: forming research questions. Research questions help us plan the right scope for our interviewing questions, and they also help us understand the world where our interviewees inhabits (their background, their situation, their mental model). Here are some research questions we made before conducting interviews:

1. How is their reading habits right now?
2. What motivates them to read?
3. Why do they want to continue reading?
4. What benefits does reading provide to them?
5. What are the challenges to their reading habits right now?
6. Do they use any tools or methods to overcome them? If yes, how are they using them and how effective are those tools? If no, why?

After interviewing, we found 8 potential interviewees. These 8 interviewees shared their story about their reading sessions and we found these common themes about their problems when reading:

1. Complex materials (like Humanities, Philosophy books) discourage them from reading more due to they often require readers have some beforehand knowledge before reading.
2. Took too much time researching the books (reading social media’s reviews, reading Readwise reviews, suggestions from friends) and when reading them they lost all the strength.
3. They found that the reading materials were not matched to their expectations (knowledge, the author’s point of view compared to them) and feel like they wasting time reading them.

Jobs to be Done

To better understand and determine which problem is more valuable to solve, we decided to use the good old Jobs-to-be-Done framework. This approach helped us analyze deeper about their particular actions around their reading session, understand the appropriate context and situation where they took action.

By using this framework, we grounded our work in specific, easy to recognize actions. The brainstorm resulted in three main clearly defined “jobs” for us to prioritize:

Competitor Research

We began to research some mobile apps offer options to search for more information when reading on app and found these are quite limiting in what they offer. Some provide 15-min quick read summary of the book but some of our users mentioned that it defeated the purpose of in-depth reading, while others only provide dictionary meaning of only English language.

With that in mind, we proposed a concept: an AI-native web app that can read your documents when uploaded and offer instantaneous, distraction-free experience when finding information right in your reading session.

Feature Exploration

Introducing Readmate, your reading companion always here for all your questions regrading any content in your document or your book.

A short YouTube featuring our presentation for our web app can be found right below:

What I learned

Empathy with users’ problems

A solution can only work if they can address the most painful problem of the users. That way a product can only truly show its value for solving the problem of the customers and bringing in value for the business.

Design and development always work hand in hand

By understanding how the product work through engineering architectures and business flows, I was able to make informed design decision and quickly ship the MVP for the presentation.