2. Background situation
• Lots of people seem to have problems with going to the library to borrow a
book, so we wanted to make a library that they can use and manage on their
smart phone or tablet.
- Self-Librarian:
- Who? Anyone
- What? People want to read books
- When? Anytime
- Where? Any place
- Why? Problems with going to libraries such as the journey
3. Problem
- You don’t want to have to leave the house to go and borrow a book as the
library is too far away, in a bad area, or just doesn’t have the book you want.
4. Question
• How can you borrow a book from a library without leaving your home?
5. Key insight statement(s)
• People don’t want to leave their house to borrow a book because of many
different reasons, such as a long journey, or something else.
6. Mini Elevator Pitch
My team, Team Unicorn, is developing a mobile app to help
anyone who can read, read any book they want without having to
leave their home, using our app that lets the user temporarily
download a book, and then deletes itself after 2 weeks. There is a
child safe option that will disable all books with inappropriate
language, so they can read or be read to without them learning words
they shouldn’t. There is also an option to purchase a one month
membership to unlock the adult genre of books; membership is £2 per
month. Books can be found through lots of different search methods
e.g. by genre, author, or book title.
7. User profiles
Most of our users would be teenagers, who like adventure books,
have access to internet through mobile data and Wi-Fi, the apps
they use mainly on their phones are either social or gaming apps,
like reading, prefer simple GUIs,use their phones every day,
would like a library on their phones, read frequently and have
lots of problems with going to a library (mainly because it’s too
far away).
8. Competitors or alternative solutions
that already exist in the market
As far as our research could tell, no one else has an app like ours
on any market.
9. MVP user stories and feature chosen
Our app lets the user search for any book that is available (we hope
to have almost every book available!), through a variety of
searches, such as title, author, date published, etc, and the user
can then download these books. There is a child mode option
which requires a passcode. This allows parents to let kids use the
app without worrying about the kids learning words they shouldn’t.
After 2 weeks the book deletes itself, unless the user has renewed
it, in which case it will stay. The user can only do 3 renews on the
same book.
A user downloads the app, and reads whatever book they want,
and can (eventually) share book thoughts and progress with friends
on social media sites.
12. The Technical Stuff
Data Feasibility
• Our app requires a lot of third party content from book publishers
• Hopefully they will be happy to share the content
• Their authorisation is definitely required
Technical Feasibility
• It is possible to build this app
• A professional developer could easily build it in three months
• We probably couldn’t find a simpler solution
13. Business Case
• We believe that we will be successful, as we could not find an
app that does the same job as ours, the closest we got was
iBooks, but you have to pay for the books. Users won’t have to
pay for our app, but there will have to be advertisements,
unless they pay £2 a month for membership, which doesn’t
show ads, and unlocks access to adult books.
14. Marketing Strategy
• We want to have our app spread quickly, and our main ideas
are to ask users to give us a good and honest rating on the App
Store and Play Store, which will put our app’s rating up with
Angry Birds’ ratings (eventually!!). We will also ask users to tell
their friends about the app through social media, and hopefully
friends of friends will spread word of our app, and that
continues. We will also ask that phone companies such as
Apple and Samsung show the app during adverts for new
phones.
