Qualitative Research
Course Project
Book Club On-the-Go
Buffering stress in college student communities with social leisure reading.
METHODS
Literature Review
Contextual Interviews
Co-Design
Experience Design Theatre
TEAM
4 UX Researchers: Jenny Yu, Nicole Tian, Jillian Beck, Manvi Gupta
University of Washington, HCDE
MY ROLE
UX Researcher (literature review writeup, experience design theatre protocol. Took an equal part in ideation, recruitment, study facilitation)
DURATION
8 weeks: March 2024 - May 2024
Qualitative User Research & Design Methods
Literature Review
Focus Groups
Contextual Interviews
Co-Design
Experience Design Theatre
My Role
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Duration
6 weeks: March 2024 - May 2024
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
MISSION
How might we design a social leisure reading experience to the sustain leisure reading habits of, and thereby improve the long-term well-being of college students?
.png)
Students reading an outsize book together and interacting with comments left by previous readers on sticky notes as part of Book Club On-the-Go’s social leisure reading concept.
MOTIVATION
In the pursuit of academic excellence, there is a dwindling number of students who read for leisure.
This decline in leisure reading is particularly notable among college-aged individuals, who are now the least likely demographic to engage in leisure reading. (Weigart, 2008).
Research suggests that leisure reading—despite its decline—offers significant well-being benefits, such as reducing stress and improving focus (Gauder et al., 2009).
It can also be a cost-efficient and simple buffer against stressors from college settings (Levine et al., 2023).
.png)
Student busy working on academic assignments and readings, mind occupied with thoughts of social adjustments, academic pressures, time constraints.
LITERATURE REVIEW & CONTRIBUTION
We identified a potential gap for intervention at the center of social leisure reading and improving mental well-being for college students.
Improve accountability for sustained reading & benefits (Massimi et al., 2009)
✍️
Cultivate reading interests among individuals & communities (Vlieghe et al., 2009)
📚
Improve engagement & understanding among different readers (Vlieghe et al., 2009)
💭
QUESTIONS FOR RESEARCH
What are the behaviors, motivations, and contexts of college students' different reading behaviors (or lack thereof)?
What characterizes a social leisure reading experience that can motivate and sustain their leisure reading habits?
How can we support these practices while balancing college students' needs (e.g., academic, social, personal)?
CONTEXTUAL INTERVIEWS
Initial insights on reading motivations, strategies, and attitudes from our target audience
To start, each of us reached out via our social networks and interviewed a total of 10 Cornell undergraduate students who read both on a frequent (daily/weekly) and infrequent (monthly/less) basis to get a more holistic picture of the problem space.
Reading motivations and attitudes vastly differed, but both groups of readers agree that time management and having a reading-conducive environment is important to be more engaged in reading. What specifically does that entail?
Table of findings on students’ motivations, strategies, and attitudes towards reading, which largely differ but converge in strategy. Students find reading most engaging given sufficient time and an environment that is conducive of reading.
NEXT STEPS: AN OVERVIEW
Research & design
Method 1: co-design
Consulting end-users as equal partners in imagining a social reading experience
Method 2: experience design theatre (EDT)
Beyond abstract planning, towards empathetic, interactive, and actionable insights for design
Final design: where we’re at
How Book Club On-the-Go compares to our original vision
METHOD 1: CO-DESIGN
Consulting end-users as equal partners in imagining a social reading experience
To investigate our contextual inquiry findings further, each of us facilitated a co-design session of 2-3 participants, for a total of 9 participants.
We asked participants to create and present mood-boards of their ideal (social) leisure reading experience to gain a holistic understanding of themes across them.
Example moodboards for leisure reading presented during the co-design sessions.
Takeaways for an initial design guideline
finding
recommendation
A “comfortable environment”:
📆 No pressing obligations (3/9 participants)
Place intervention in “downtime” contexts
🧐 Reading material is intriguing (3/9 participants)
Incorporate novelty or playfulness triggers
Reading “together”:
👥 Students who didn’t mind reading ‘with others’ preferred doing so in a physical/intimate setting (5/9 participants)
Enable small-scale, co-located interactions
Reading alone or together?
📖 Different preferences for reading alone/’together’ (5/9 wouldn’t mind reading ‘together’ (in-person), 6/9 generally prefer reading ‘alone’
*See prototype 1 & method 2
*Our group initially struggled with this finding. We realized that participants’ definitions of “social reading” meant they had to be physically in the same space as another person while reading. However:
-
students had engaged in ‘social reading’ that they didn’t initially realized qualified as such (e.g., GoodReads, reading in Barnes and Nobles around other kids, etc.)
-
our literature review had shown the promise of a social leisure reading intervention. Was this not actually viable?
This influenced our choice for Method 2.
Prototype 1: pivot to method 2
In response to finding 3, I proposed & designed our second method, an experience design theatre (EDT) in order to work closely with users and rapidly iterate through a set of simulations to see what a solution that would really work for them looks like.
In the meantime, each of us brainstormed some ideas for our first prototype that we would bring to kickoff the EDT. We selected and combined ideas based on how they aligned with our initial guidelines.
Image of prototype 1: treasure hunting for digital books around campus. 2 students are on the way to class, when they are notified via phone that they have discovered a set of readings.
METHOD 2: EXPERIENCE DESIGN THEATRE (EDT)
Beyond abstract planning, towards empathetic, interactive, and actionable insights for design
We conducted 1 session with the 4 of us as “actors”, and 4 participant “critics”.
.png)
Chart displaying the progression of the simulated social leisure reading experience across 3 iterations, and the insights generated from those simulations
Summarizing the EDT: cross-validating & building upon our previous guidelines from the co-design
High level version of affinity mapping for key observations and quotes from the EDT.
finding
recommendation
Shared attention
👥 Emphasis on shared spaces/media that capture rather than distract from mutual focus
Enable opportunities for shared, face to face attention
Trustworthy design
⭐️ Embedding the solution in a well-established program like Cornell’s transport/library systems
Ensure intervention is public-facing and credible
Opportunities for intrigue
🧐 Iterations increasingly taking advantage of intrigue as an opportunity to capture attention & social interaction
Let people gather, rather than forcing them to.
Ambient reading
⚙️ Bus radio as reading & ambience
Provide optional reading features
Cross-validation of our previous guidelines
Common values voiced through critique: placing the intervention in an
-
unobtrusive
-
intimate, and
-
optionally collaborative context
Ambient reading
⚙️ Bus radio as reading & ambience
Provide optional reading features
RESULTS & IMPACT
Book Club On-the-Go: where we left off
At the end of EDT, we arrived at Book Club On-the-Go, a collaborative program between campus libraries and the TCAT (community bus system) that features a monthly book. Students access this program via broadcast and audiobooks on the TCAT and pass by a tablet displaying an annotative e-book in front of a campus library.
Students chatting and leaving sticky note reactions on an oversized book by the library.
Students chatting about the bus’s audio reading during their transit to/from campus.
How Book Club On-the-Go compares to our original vision and guidelines
The prototype supports our previous definition of social leisure reading, i.e., reading in one’s free time in social contexts, through:
(Optionally) engaging social reading experience
✅
Less intrusive in daily routine
✅
Social aspect: intimate/in-person
✅
Our prototype also aligns with the initial points for potential for social leisure reading to sustain reading habits.
Improve accountability for sustained reading habits
The book’s analog form lends itself to an element of asynchronous, continued anticipation and surprise that draws readers into the ever-changing book notes. Likewise with the monthly bus/library book features.
✍️
Cultivate reading interests The sticky note threads of our open book allow students to “reverse-engage” with our book.
i.e.: Interest in sticky note threads that respond to book content → curiosity towards book content → re-engage with sticky notes
📚
Improve engagement & understanding
Book Club On-the-Go uses verbal conversations on the TCAT and physical gathering around the open library book, as well as using sticky note threads to deepen readers’ understanding of the reading content.
💭
REFLECTIONS
Personal takeaways & next steps
Takeaways
-
Technological innovation is not the answer to every problem - working iteratively with users in EDT, Book Club On-the-Go uses existing vehicle audio functions and a book without any machine component. Both still intrigue people to engage in reading and allow for both “synchronous” and “asynchronous” co-reading, as desired in user research.
-
Designing for the subjective reading experience across an audience of both more/less avid readers, this project taught me to embrace complexity, rather than trying to simplify it.
Future work
Limitations: Although EDT brought this prototype closer to users’ actual lived experiences, the sessions were too short and studying the long-term effects of boosting accountability, social motivation, and engagement was out of our scope.
Future research should explore extended interactions and expansion to other campuses for a more comprehensive understanding of how our prototype aligns with student reading experiences and mental well-being.
HCI Design/Research
Research Assistantship
Course Project
Centralizing event discovery and nearby peer visibility to make connecting easier and more meaningful.