BOOKMARKED
An app for readers.
Bookmarked is designed to help bring the experience of reading into a digital space. Set a reading goal for the year, get recommendations, and see you book shelves anytime anywhere. We have removed the failed attempts at creating social media spaces within reading apps and instead tried to make sure you get the best personal experience. Bookmarked was created to give you a private space to write reviews and organise your library.
What is bookmarked?
This project began through frustration. Goodreads is the current leader in the space of online book reviewing, and it is awful. It is always bugging and the UI looks sad and cold. I wanted to create something that could combat this. Thus Bookmarked, the concept, was born.
It is a way to curate your reading into digital bookshelves and leave private reviews. Private reviews were important to me as I can be quite scathing in my reviewing but I would never want an author to see that review and be upset.
Something else I wanted to do with my application was allow the possibility for personalisation. I wanted to give the app some character and life because the experience of reading books is such a deeply vibrant and personal one.
It has been suggested to me in previous feedback to allow something that is full customisable, in a similar way to a video game avatar. I did love this idea and wanted to bring it to my app in the form of a personalised bookcase, this could be any colour, material or theme, you could even add collectables to the shelves. However I have to think about the practicalities of what I am creating, to do something like this you would end with essentially infinite bookcases which would all have to be coded and function through constant updates based on your reading. If I had millions of pounds and a great team of developers then maybe this would be possible but for now I needed to think of a more realistic way that I could incorporate some form of individuality into the app’s design. This is where my idea to have genre based themes came in.
I have developed a series of possible themes for the app based on popular genres. Over time this could develop into more genres based on demand. This allows the users to have a certain level of control over their experience on the app whilst only needing a handful of variants for the visual interface.
