realbook is my baby :)
Except for being the designer I'm also a co-founder, hence involved in almost every aspect of the service.
Let me walk you through.
Let me walk you through.
How it all started?
As people who love to read but find themselves doing so less and less, we felt the problem wasn’t us, but the way the book market works. We found out that reading a book consumes too much of the reader's resources.
We challenged ourselves to create a solution that will help people read more books, and came out with realbook - a startup that allows readers to borrow their books through delivery service.
Research
Listening to many readers, from bookworms to people who last read a book in high school, taught us much about our users and their needs, we defined our target audience and started crafting our product.
We didn’t skip checking our competitors, to verify we are truly bringing a better alternative.
Our Values
As part of defining our product character, we identified 9 values that represent realbook vision. We meet our readers in various ways - from the book itself, through its packing, to the app. Each of these interactions is supported by realbook unique visual language, resonants realbook values. More about realbook values in our webpage (includes beautiful animation made by Elisheva Kessel to my illustrations)
What about the books?
Welcome to our Merlo (in hebrew - short for logistic warehouse). The hall of books. Here happens all book related matters. Books arrive here, get sorted, cleaned and branded.
Next step for each book is Miriam - our tailor-made app for handling all data related to our books. We put great emphasis on book details, in order to avoid unfortunate mistakes while identifying a book.
Miriam enables us to search books, by name, or quickly by barcode, view and edit their details, and add new books. We can also see how many copies we have from each book and their condition.
In realbook, we separate a book from a copy. While Miriam handles books data, Manuela handles the copies we keep at our Merlo.
Manuela’s dashboard offers a quick overview about our copies status and whereabouts.
With Manuela we can quickly shelve copies into free hives with only two scans - one for the copy and the second for the cell.
With books on the shelf - we are ready for orders :) Manuela lets us keep track on all book reservations, from the moment our reader confirmed her order, through the collecting process and shipping, to back at the merlo.
With our Turbo2000 Collector, we collect up to 4 orders in one round, while Manuela guides us through the most efficient way through the hives.
Something to read?
At the heart of our service is realbook app, available to download in stores ✨
We launched the Alpha version for a limited audience, with our first dovecot - pick up and return point - in Pardes-Hanna-Karkur.
After a short onboarding, our reader is presented with a feed of all available copies for her to loan. She can search by book name, or by author, translator or illustrator, and sort by different genres.
After the order arrives at the dovecot, the reader will get a notification that her order is ready for pick up. Two scans and she gets her books 🙂
We are constantly adding new and exciting features, so stay tuned and follow us in your favorite network (facebook, instagram or linkedin)
Likes books? Check out realbook app in the stores https://realbook.page.link/install