Goal-Oriented eReader Widget

This week’s design challenge was to create a progress bar. I decided to make one that tracks a user’s progress through a book.

Progress through the book to help the dog reach its toy

In my experience, on the spectrum of readers, there are two extremes:

1. The Blackhole Readers (this includes me!): readers who start a book before bed and don’t stop until there’s suddenly no more pages left and the sun is up. All those hours vanished in a literary blackhole.
2. The Foot Dragger Readers: readers who enjoy reading, but have trouble getting into books and/or have trouble focusing on a book long enough to get through it.

I wanted to create an eReader widget to help both these readers come down or up from their extremes. I created a widget that lets readers set a page goal for a reading session.

The user starts by setting a page-based reading goal, and as the user reads, they can track the dog’s progress towards its toy. When they reach their goal, they’re able to set a new goal.

For the Blackhole Readers, the overlay will act as an alarm, something that will interrupt their progress and force them to surface from their book and, perhaps, notice that it’s time for bed (but maybe not!). They can easily continue reading, but at least now it’ll be harder to unwittingly lose hours to the blackhole.

For the Foot Dragger Reader, the idea is to make the book less daunting. If you’re a Foot Dragger, nothing is more frustrating than starting a book at 0% and feeling like you’ve read a lot only to be at 4%. This widget allows them to redefine “done.” If they like reading 50 pages per night, it’ll be 50 pages before the dog catches the ball. What total percentage of the book is 50 pages? It doesn’t matter. A goal was set and a goal was achieved.

“As a foot dragging reader myself, having a small achievable page goal that I can easily reach and then decide in the moment to push up to another few pages would probably halve the time it takes me to finish a book.” -Jessica M.