Booked.

Inspiration

We were inspired by self help apps that encouraged mindfulness and unplugging from your phone. We were also inspired by apps like Strava which tracks your progress on hobbies and can also be used in a competitive manner!

What it does

Booked. is an app that focuses on encouraging users to read more with less distractions. It has several features that surround the main 3 foundational characteristics we wanted to embody: schedule, connect, and expand.

Schedule: Booked.'s schedule characteristic encompasses organizing the user's reading goals into tangible, set-in-stone time blocks that help them achieve their desired objective. It takes the mental load of planning out and remembering daily tasks by automatically detecting ideal times for the user to read and scheduling it in the calendar they already use, such as Google Calendar. We have several types of feature that surround schedule:

Daily scheduling helper: as mentioned above, this feature takes in your current calendar events and suggests when the user should take personal reading breaks
Book club scheduling helper: this feature takes yours and other Booked. user's schedule and compares it to schedule a time when each individual is free to meet. This is beneficial to arrange book club meetings or just to continue connecting with your friends!
Progress stats: this feature falls under the schedule category by allowing the user to visualize their progress, making it easier for them to determine whether they are on track to their goals.

Connect: Connection is the most important characteristic we planned this app for. Scheduling and expansion helps add onto this aspect. We based this app to not only connect individuals to a community of book lovers, but in doing so, it also aims to disconnect users from their phone:

Disconnection - Phone lock: Booked. tracks not only how much you read, but also tracks how long you read: during your reading sessions, you can start a countdown timer or a stopwatch. In doing so, you're no longer able to access your phone unless you stop the clock!
(Dis)connection - Friend tab: The friend tab is the core hub of the Connect characteristic. It both disconnects you from your phone while also encouraging connection with the community by building your "Book club list" community through invitations and scheduling meetings with your friends! By scheduling times to hang out with friends, we hope to unplug users and lessen the solitary social media habits like doom scrolling.
Connection - Visiting friends libraries: by publicizing libraries, our goal is to encourage discussion amongst users about interesting books and possibly going further to encourage book lending between friends.

Expand: Expand focuses on broadening your knowledge. There are several ways to grow:

Visiting friends libraries: this feature allows for shared knowledge. Things spread from word of mouth, especially book recs.
In general, our app encourages reading, which is a very straightforward way to gain knowledge!

How we built it

React Native: front end technology for our mobile app
MongoDB: NoSQL database for fast and efficient storage and retrieval
Express: utilized for fast server-side operations
Expo: provided streamlined development environment
Figma: used to design and create prototypes

Challenges we ran into

Over scoping - had to scrap our original idea 8 hours in Trouble with OpenAI API Didn't have a full team to work on multiple features

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of our design, and we plan to finish and implement the features we couldn't later on because of it. We're also proud of implementing several features, like the library view, which took several hours of troubleshooting.

What we learned

We should make sure that when we brainstorm, we keep a realistic goal for features we want to implement.

What's next for Booked.

Generated book recommendations: This was one of the features we actually planned for, but unfortunately didn't have time for.
Gamifying: Just to make it more fun for users
Rating & Reviews: We wanted for our library to be interactive where clicking a book would pull up your personal review of it. This would also let other people see your rating too.