Reintroducing a classic...

“In a fast-paced technological era, we proudly celebrate the artistry of the human touch”. This quote pulled from the Moleskine Manifesto, set the tone for the journey we were about to embark on as a team. We all know the classic Moleskine notebook, with its sleek outline, iconic colors, and nice elastic band. The accessory that fits in most bags and accompanies creatives, writers, and students alike.

Color me intrigued

Moleskine currently offers a “smart notebook” that allows users to digitize their work and upload pages through a watermark in the corner of the pages that correspond with either Dropbox or Adobe. However, Moleskine wanted a way to utilize this technology to cultivate a creative community in some sort of social media format.

Affinity Map

6 interviews

We were able to conduct six interviews based on our initial probe and received very valuable insights on how and why people utilize their notebooks. We were also able to get an understanding for why people feel compelled to share their creative processes with other people. From here we created an affinity map to identify trends within the responses and let’s just say, we have no shortage of information.

Hi, I'm Bodhi!

"I am a creative business owner who uses my notebook to make sense of all the ideas in my head. I sketch client branding material, doodle, and just make things for the fun of it."

• Uses notebooks to brainstorm for client projects
• Tends to be a bit disorganized with their physical materials
• Wants to be inspired by new materials
• Wants to be able to share their creative process with other creatives
• Is frustrated by the fact that they can't share a polished creative process

Let's go on a journey!

"I love the idea and act of creating new things. I do however get frustrated with myself because I tend to be disorganized. I would love to have a platform other than Instagram to share and observe the creative processed of others as well as share my own. However, I'm put off at the thought of having to "compete" for affirmation for something that is a personal process."

A sketch a day keeps the doctor away...

We used rapid sketching as a way to get our ideas out. As a group we did sketching separately and came together to combine what we most wanted to highlight within the app.

Once we felt confident with a specific direction, we took our efforts to Figma and started the iteration for our mid-fi prototype.

Testing, Testing.... Is this thing on?

We conducted 4 usability tests on our mid-fi and realized certain decisions didn't land with users quite like we had thought. We had included features like an overlay navigation hamburger menu, many customizable privacy settings, and created an upload camera landing page. The intention was to not have extra features taking the spotlight away from the work that should be front and center.
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To our user, the seamless and intuitive experience we had envisioned, didn't translate. Moving forward from the usability tests, we took our feedback to the high-fi iteration process. We changed the navigation to a bottom menu, we simplified the privacy settings, and changed the landing page to the friend’s feed.

Ready, Set, Share!

When making our visual design decisions, we wanted to stay as true to the brand as possible. There was no reinventing the branding wheel so to say, but rather expanding the Moleskine brand offerings. We wanted to stick to their minimalistic and analogue feel but somehow seamlessly mesh that with the demands of this technological feat.

We tested our first high-fi iteration with 3 more people and received a few more areas to grow before we documented our final prototype within the time-constraints we had for the project. We added an indicator to the bottom navigation so people could see where they were in the app and extended the notification window so people could actually read what was on the screen.
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View Prototype

In Conclusion

Overall, we were really pleased with how our final prototype turned out. We felt like it held true to the branding of Moleskine and felt like it really encapsulated what we were trying to accomplish with combining or mimicking an analogue experience with the digital. Due to time constraints, we were not able to focus as much on the collaborative aspect of this app. While commentary feedback is customizable, that was more of a plug and play feature. We would really like to spend more time developing a way for users to be more collaborative within individual notebooks in real-time. We would also like to be able to showcase within the app the emphasis, or lack thereof, of the competitive features that social media apps usually include.

Leski for Moleskine