I’m Saoirse, a self-driven Visual Designer with over two years of experience working within the design industry. I’m dedicated to the ever-evolving study of interaction design and emerging technologies.
I’m a coffee lover and problem solver with a love for Illustration and UX design. I'm an avid reader and enjoy attending tech & design meetups. I’m currently on the Women In Tech Committee to help set up & promote events within Belfast.
In 2018 only 51% of UK adults had read a book in the last year. Bookmark is a mobile app that aims to change this. Our mission statement is to encourage you to read more by helping you find books you love and reviews you can trust from friends.
Bookmark is not only an app, but it's a community for readers for you to connect and share book recommendations with. The app helps users develop a solid reading habit through viewing book reviews and setting daily goals. Users have the option to set their goals in either hours or pages. Once users meet their daily reading goals, they’ll successfully unlock 1 out of 8 different achievement awards.
Developing Bookmark has been a long but rewarding process involving a lot of iterative prototypes, usability testing and feedback. It started with initial research into reading habits and how reading for pleasure amongst children and young people is steadily on the decline with the 2.2 % drop since 2016. I wanted to create an app to help change this through gamification, whilst also recognising the gap in the current market. You can view all of my research on Bookmark on my Dashboard.
My Illustration style developed quite a bit from the original work I produced in semester 1. I decided to go with a more minimal approach. The key thing I wanted to stand out in my illustrations is the small but effective use of colour in some areas, to convey Bookmarks colour scheme. Through a lot of sketches on both paper and digitally using Procreate, feedback and research into the latest trends in illustrations I recreated my onboarding illustrations to reflect my brand and to add more personality to my onboarding.
Bookmark was created on Adobe XD and you can view a demo of the app here. Visit the promotional website to view a detailed breakdown of the key features of Bookmark and how you can start improving your reading habits today. Make sure you join the community by downloading the app and following us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
