Desapega: How can we increase the lifespan of books left unused?

User Researcher

UX Designer

UI Designer

Figma

Enactus USA

Desapega is a non-profit app with the goal of taking down the user barriers related to book donation and exchange.

📚 Study case featured on UX Collective Br. 🎖️ Finalist at Enacthon, a hackathon for social entrepreneurship ideas.

Desapega's final frames

Context: How to create a social entrepreneurship project?

The Enactus Network is a international non-profit initiative that brings together student, academic, and business leaders committed to using the power of entrepreneurial action to transform lives and shape a better, more sustainable world. In Brazil, they promote their annual hackathon, the Enacthon, as a way to inspire and drive its participants to envision new ideas.

Desapega was created as one of those ideas - inspired by the recognition of a significant problem: the accessibility of books in Brazil due to high costs and a scarcity of libraries. The project aims to facilitate the circulation of books, enabling a single book to be shared among multiple people, thereby spreading knowledge and enhancing accessibility.

The was one of the finalists to the event, and it's idea is still being adapted and developed by a group of students at the University of São Paulo's Enactus.

One of the main flows of the app.

The process: Identifying emotional and logistical barriers to exchanging books

A comprehensive desk research made clear that books can be considered a luxury in Brazil - they are way overpriced and at least 23% of the population, according to the Pro-Book Institution, claims they don't have the habit of reading because they don't have access to books. As the price of new books wasn't something we could tackle to ensure accessibility, we came up with a new approach - how to create an incentive for people to exchange and donate their books after they read them.

But what exactly was the potential here? Are people willing to change their habits and consume used books?

To start to understand better our user, we launched a quantitative questionnaire with the intention of determining who could be our target. From the results we got that young people, especially students, were the right demographics to focus on - they tend to read a lot as they need it to study and they are also already familiar with the logistics of buying used products online. From our research with more than 100 responses we gathered that 41% of the demographics would be willing to consume used book, they just don't really know how to get, are not willing to go in person to a bookstore or did not get the chance to buy an used book before.

In this preliminary research, we also discovered that although more than 80% of the participants had the habit of buying books, a significantly smaller number had the habit of donating them.

I'm sure that if you looked in your shelf right now, you will see a lot of books that you don't intend to ever read again, so why exactly are they still there?

To determine more deeply the barrier of book donation and exchange, we choose to conduct 10 in dept interviews with different kinds of profiles: those who buy and donate books and those who still don't

The main insights were that:

There is still some resistance to lending books, many of the interviewees reported having had bad experiences before;

All the interviewees mentioned the importance of passing books forward and recognized that it does not make sense to keep all the books they own;

Some interviewees have an attachment to books and find it easier to donate to family members or other people they know and trust;

All of them were willing to give donation and exchanging a try.

Visual Identity

The solution: an easy-to-use book exchanging platform that creates connections

The solution was the creation of Desapega, an app designed to facilitate the exchange and donation of books. The app was developed to be intuitive and trustworthy, incorporating features, like the addition of pictures and an AI verification that allowed users to view and choose books for donation or exchange while ensuring trust in the condition of the books and the reliability of other users.

To ensure that the emotional barrier of book donation and exchange was taken down, we also designed features to create a real community, like being able to post reviews and also communicate with the person you were exchanging a book with or getting a donation from.

User flow to ask for the donation or exchange of a book

In the research phase it was made clear to us that for a community to properly function we have to find the balance of "givers" "takers" and "matchers" - which means that it is important that people don't come to our platform only to receive donations but also to give them. At first thpught it seammed that only gibing the option of exchanging books or forcing people to register books to donate in order to participate in the community would be a great solution to ensure that everyone was a "matcher" - but taking the wireframes back to user testing made us realize that this limitation would leave out one important persona - the one that can't afford to pay for book at all, and so, doesn't have none to donate.

As our idea was initially thought to combat the inaccessibility of books, this observation made us change the models we were creating to unsure maximum accessibility - and we designed a flow so that if you can't offer a book in return for the one you are going to receive, you can leave a thank you instead.

Onboarding flow.

The development of the app went through several phases of prototyping and usability testing, adjusting based on user feedback to maximize ease of use and effectiveness, which were crucial to the final product. We changed some confusing interactions and ended up with a tested and user approved prototype.

Confusing interaction on the right, that was adjusted to the one on the left.

After the Enacthon, the app started being developed by partners of the Enactus Network and is now frozen due to a strategic decision of pivoting it's main focus to books that help college students study for the ENEM (similar to the SATs). But it's flow and final interfaces is completely ready to be taken off of paper and be tested with it's first users.